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HISTORY
OF —
WAYNE COUNTY
OHIO
VOLUME I
ILLUSTRATED
1910
B. F. BOWEN & COMPANY
INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
Digitized by
DEDICATION.
This work is respectfully dedicated to
THE PIONEERS,
since departed. May the memory of those who laid down their
burdens by the wayside ever be fragrant as the breath
of summer flowers, for their toils and sac-
rifices have made Wayne County
a garden of sunshine
and delights.
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Google
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PREFACE.
“jEFFRIES* HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY."
The above title of the “New History of Wayne County" was a dedication
to the Jeffries, the father, John P. Jeffries, being an author, resident of Wayne
county while living, of whom Lemuel P. Jeffries was the only surviving son
living in the county. Mr. Lemuel Jeffries regarded the mention of the family
name as a compliment to his father and himself, and was taking an interest in
the history when, after a brief illness, he died in the summer of 1909. The
title of the New History is, as above, still preserved as a memorial of them.
All life and achievement is evolution; present wisdom comes from past
experience, and present commercial prosperity has come only from past exer-
tion and suffering. The deeds and motives of the men that have gone before
have been instrumental in shaping the destinies of later communities and
states. The development of a new country was at once a task and a privi-
lege. It required great courage, sacrifice and privation. Compare the pres-
ent conditions of the people of Wayne county, Ohio, with what they were one
hundred years ago. From a trackless wilderness and virgin prairie, it has
come to be a center of prosperity and civilization, with millions of wealth, sys-
tems of railways, grand educational institutions, splendid industries and im-
mense agricultural productions. Can any thinking person be insensible to
the fascination of the study which discloses the incentives, hopes, aspirations
and efforts of the early pioneers who so strongly laid the foundation upon
which has been reared the magnificent prosperity of later days? To perpetu-
ate the story of these people and to trace and record the social, political and
industrial progress of the community from its first inception is the function
of the local historian. A sincere purpose to preserve facts and personal mem-
oirs that are deserving of perpetuation, and which unite the present to the
past, is the motive for the present publication. The work has been in the hands
of able writers, who have, after much patient study and research, produced
here the most complete history and collection of biographical memoirs of
Wayne county, Ohio, ever offered to the public. A specially valuable and
interesting department is that one devoted to the sketches of representative
citizens of this county whose records deserve preservation because of their
worth, effort and accomplishment. The publishers desire to extend their
Digitized by boogie
thanks to the gentlemen who have so faithfully labored to this end. Thanks
are also due to the citizens of Wayne county for the uniform kindness with
wdiich they have regarded this undertaking and for their many services
rendered in the gaining of necessary information.
In placing this work before the citizens, the publishers can conscientiously
claim that they have carried out the plan as outlined in the prospectus. Every
biographical sketch in the work has been submitted to the party interested, for
correction, and therefore any error of fact, if there be any, is solely due to the
person for whom the sketch was prepared. Confident that our efforts to please
will fully meet the approbation of the public, we are,
Respectfully,
THE PUBLISHERS.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I— THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY 17
The French Coming in 1604 — Grant of James I — Forts Built from Lakes to
the Mississippi — New France, so-called — English Claim the Territory — Treaty
with the Six Nations — The Ohio Company — Moravian Missionaries — North-
west Territory Annexed to and Made a Part of the Province of Quebec — Vir-
ginia’s Claim North of the Ohio River — Finally Secured to the United States
— Ordinance of 1787 — Slavery Excluded — Populations — Original Squatters —
Character of the People — Organization of the Ohio Land Company — New F^g-
landers Come in Second “Mayflower” — First Settlement Under Ordinance of
1787 — Surveys and Public Land Grants — The French Grant — United States
Military Lands — The Moravian Lands — The Refugee Tract — Dohrman’s Grant
— Indian* Treaties — Treaty of Fort Harmar — First Territorial Officers — Second
Territorial Government — Early Territorial Laws — Organization of Early Coun-
ties— Early Ohio Villages and Towns.
CHAPTER II— INDIAN TRIBES AND MILITARY CAMPAIGNS 32
Military Expeditions Against the Indians — The Greenville Treaty of 1795 —
Governor* St. Clair — Harmar’s Defeat — Battle of Falling Timbers — Peace Se-
cured— Second Grade of Territorial Government — First Council and House of
Representatives — The Territory of Indiana Created in 1800 — Wayne County's
Representatives — State Government Commenced March 3, 1803 — Military Cam-
paigns in Wayne County — The Burning of Colonel Crawford — Beall’s Cam-
paign— Battle of the Cow Pens — Latest Tribes of Wayne County Indians — The
Delawares — Wyandots — Shawnees — Indians of Wayne County, Strictly Speak-
ing— Wayne County Indian Trails — Chief Killbuck — Massacre of Sixteen Indi-
ans at Wooster.
CHAPTER III— GLACIATION, ARCHAEOLOGY, MOUND BUILDERS, ETC 55
Widely Separated Geological Formations — Opinions as to Dividing Line — Pre-
glacial Topography — Nature and Magnitude of the Glacial Effects — An Island
in a Silurian Sea — Altitudes in Wayne County — Preglacial Streams and their
Outlets — The First Dry Land in the United States — Long Periods of Waiting —
Nature’s Convulsions — Formation of Coal Deposits — A River that No Man ever
Saw — Preglacial Drainage Lines — Current of Streams Reversed — Glaciation
in Wayne County — Lakes and Swamps — Early Wild Game — A Remarkable
Pigeon Roost — Human Relics Found in the Drift of Wayne County — The
Moccasin Last Stone — Geology of the District — Description of the Stone — Con-
clusions— Other Evidences — Animal Remains Found in the Muck Swamps —
The Indians of Wayne County — Prominent Indian Chiefs — Fortifications and
Enclosures — Mounds — Implements and Artifacts of the Aborigines — Village
Sites — General Reliquia — Pottery — Burials.
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CONTENTS.
CHAPTER IV— TOPOGRAPHY AND GENERAL FEATURES 98
Surface Once Covered by Deep Sea — Composition of Soil — Area of County and
Townships — Once Heavily Timbered — Streams of the County — Surface of the
County — Prairies — The Lakes — Newman’s Creek Swamp — Once a Favorite
Retreat for Wild Animals and Game— Killbuck Swamp — Coal Mines of the
County.
CHAPTER V— EARLY SETTLEMENT OF THE COUNTY 108
Pioneers Largely from Pennsylvania — Character of the Pioneers — Early Con-
ditions— Hospitality Ever Foremost — Old Ways Superseded by New Methods
— First Settlements in the County — Pioneer Families.
CHAPTER VI— ORGANIZATION OF WAYNE COUNTY 114
Appointment of Governor St. Clair— Wayne, the Third County Formed in the
Northwest Territory— Early Boundaries— Old Greenville Treaty Line— Detroit,
the County Seat — The Connecticut Western Reserve — Boundaries of Wayne
County in 1808— Ashland County Taken from Wayne^Wayne County Organ-
ized in 1812— Organization of Townships — Origin of Name of Wayne County.
CHAPTER VII— COUNTY GOVERNMENT 122
First Election of County Officers — Commissioners Form First Four Town-
ships— First County Seat — Court House History — Wayne County Jails — Old
and New County Office Buildings — County Infirmary — The Children’s Home —
Property Valuation of County.
CHAPTER VIII— CIVIL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY 130
The Present Generation’s Indebtedness to the Past — Early Civilization and
Pioneer Renown Attributable to Great Ancestry — Education — The Revolu-
tionary Purpose — The Constitution — Founders of Government in the North-
west— Pioneer Mothers — Indian Government — Their Customs — Treaty Nego-
tiations— Organized Government in Wayne County — Territorial Council — Ter-
ritorial Legislature — Early Laws — The Constitution of 1802 — Elective Fran-
chise of the Constitution of 1802 — The City of Wooster — Township and Town
Government — Our Great Constitutional System — Early Method of Enforcing
the Law — Professional Influences — Early Lawyers and Physicians — The Con-
stitution of 1851 — Influence of Party Organization Among the People — The
Heredity of Governing Capacity — Organization of Townships Completed —
Forty Years of Government — Able County Administrations — Clean Judicial
Record — Wayne County as the Source of Northwestern Government — Indi-
vidual and Social Life — Great Principles of the Pioneer Fathers and Mothers
— Wayne County Centennial Celebration — Wayne and Associate Counties Pro-
lific of Great Men.
CHAPTER IX— COUNTY, STATE AND NATIONAL REPRESENTATION 174
Members of Congress — Members of the Constitutional Convention — State Sena-
tors— Members of the House of Representatives — General Representation from
Wayne County — The Circuit Court — Judges of Common Pleas Court — Asso-
ciate Judges — Clerks of Common Pleas Court — County Treasurers — County
Auditors — Probate Judges — Sheriffs — County Commissioners — County Survey-
ors— County Recorders — Prosecuting Attorneys — Infirmary Directors.
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CONTENTS.
CHAPTER X— EDUCATIONAL 185
Early Attention to Education — Primitive Schools — The Pioneer Instructors —
The Public School System — Smlthville High School — First Schools of Wayne
County Townships — Schools at Shreve — Canaan Academy — School Statistics
of Wayne County — Present Standing of Wayne County Schools — Centralization
of Rural Schools — Advantages of Centralization.
CHAPTER XI— AGRICULTURE 193
The Soil — The Waverly Floor — Glacial Influence of the Soil — Early Settle-
ments Near Springs — The Progress of Agriculture — The Pioneer Period —
Primitive Implements — Little Market Demand for Early Products — Comple-
tion of Ohio Canal . Affords Outlet — Production of Cereal Crops, 1851-9 — The
Development Period — Production of Cereal Crops, 18G0-9 and 1870-9 — The Ex-
pansion Period — Production of Cereal Crops, 1880-9, 1890-9 and 1900-9 — Live-
stock Statistics — The Scientific Period — Minor Crops — Average Areas — The
Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station — Litigation over Bond Issue — The In-
stitution’s Work of Great Value and Importance — The Future of Agriculture
In Wayne County — Yields of Unfertilized Land — Average Yield of Crops —
Yields from Acid Phosphate — Yields from Complete Fertilizer — Yields from
Unfertilized Land — Yields from Open-yard and Fresh Manure, and from Phos-
phated Manure — Station Experiments a Safe Guide to General Practice — Possi-
Agricultural Society — Progressive Farmers’ Association — Plain Township
bility of Larger Yields — Demonstration of Means nd Methods — Wayne County
Farmers’ Club.
CHAPTER XII— MILITARY HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY 218
Wayne County Block Houses — Necessity for Protection — Fort Stidger — Con-
struction of Forts — Revolutionary Pensioners in 1840 — Pensioners of the War
of 1812 — Wayne County in the Mexican War — List of Soldiers from this
County — Wayne County and the Civil W’ar — The First Volunteers — Fourth
Ohio Regiment — Its History — Sixteenth Ohio Regiment — Noted for its Fine
Discipline — Forty-first Ohio Regiment — One Hundred and Twentieth Regi-
ment— One Hundred and Second Regiment — One Hundred and Seventh Regi-
ment— Ninth Ohio Cavalry — Miscellaneous Detachments from Wayne County
— In Memoriam — The First Soldier Wounded from Wayne County — Soldiers
of the Spanish-American War — Officers and Members of Company D, Eighth
Ohio Regiment.
CHAPTER XIII— THE CHURCHES OF WAYNE COUNTY 241
High Moral Sentiment and Respect for Sacred Things Among Pioneers — Bap-
tist Church — First Church Formed in Wayne County — The Wooster Church —
Baptist Church of Millbrook — Second Baptist Church at Wooster, Colored —
Reformed Church at Wooster — Reformed Church of Reedsburg — Reformed
Church of Marshallville — Reformed Church of Orrville Reformed Church,
Canaan Township — Reformed Church, Milton Township — Reformed Church,
East Union Township — Zion’s Evangelical Lutheran Church of Wooster — Evan-
gelical Lutheran Christ Church — Lutherans in Plain Township — Salem Luther-
an Church, Wayne Township — Canaan Lutheran Churches — Evangelical Luth-
eran Church — Lutheran Church, Plain Township — St. Paul’s Reformed Luther-
an Church — English Lutheran Mission Church — West Lebanon Evangelical
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CONTENTS.
Church — Jacob’s Lutheran Church — Trinity English Lutheran Church — Evan-
gelical Churches — Evangelical Association — Church cf Christ — Shreve Chris-
tian Church — Disciple Church, Plain Township — First Presbyterian Church,
Wooster — Westminster Presbyterian Church — Marshallville Presbyterian
Church — Sugarcreek Presbyterian Church — Orrville Presbyterian Church —
Presbyterians in Canaan Township — Wayne Presbyterian Church — Presbyter-
ianism in Greene Township — Applecreek Presbyterian Church— Paintville Pres-
byterian Church — Other Presbyterian Churches in the County — United Pres-
byterian Church — Fredericksburg United Presbyterian Church — Dalton United
Presbyterian Church — Church of God — Franklin Township Church of God—
St. James Episcopal Church — Methodist Episcopal Church — First Methodist
Episcopal Church of Wooster — Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church of Woos-
ter— Fredericksburg Methodist Episcopal Church — Canaan Township Method-
ism— Bend Church — Methodism in Franklin Township — Creston Methodist
Episcopal Church — Methodist Episcopal Church, Orrville, and Other Churches
— The Catholic Church — St. Mary’s Church, Wooster — St. Michael’s Church —
Milton Township Catholic Church — Sts. Peter and Paul’s Church — French
Settlement Church — At Sterling — Died Among Strangers — Sonneberg Swiss
Mennonite Congregation — Amish Mennonite Church — Mennonite Church of
Sugarcreek Township — Salem Mennonite Church — Congregational Church —
Other Early Churches.
CHAPTER XIV— FRATERNAL SOCIETIES 280
Freemasonry — Various Bodies at Wooster — West Salem Lodge — Oddfellow-
ship — Knights of Pythias — Improved Order of Red Men — Royal Arcanum —
Knights of Honor — Grand Army of the Republic — Woman’s Relief Corps,
Ladles of the Grand Army, and Daughters of Veterans.
CHAPTER XV— BENCH AND BAR 287
A Proud Record and Interesting History — Character of the Bar — Judges of
Common Pleas — Circuit Judges, Fifth District — Early Prosecuting Attorneys
— Lawyers of 1812 — Present-day Wayne County Attorneys — Former Members
of Wayne County Bar Practicing Elsewhere — Lawyers Who Died While Mem-
bers of the Bar of Wayne County — Members of the Wayne County Bar who
Died Elsewhere.
CHAPTER XVI— NEWSPAPERS OF WAYNE COUNTY 312
Ohio Spectator — Ohio Oracle — Wooster Journal and Democratic Times — Woos-
ter Democrat — Wooster Republican, Weekly and Daily — Wooster Correspond-
ent— Republican Advocate — Western Telegraph — Democratic Republican —
Present Wayne County Democrat and Daily News — The Wayne County Stand-
ard— American Eagle — Wayne County Herald — Wooster Journal — The Jack-
sonian— The Evening News — The Evening Journal — The Orrville Crescent and
Orrville Courier — The Dalton Gazette — The Creston Journal — The Doylestown
Journal — West Salem Reporter— Shreve News.
CHAPTER XVII— THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 322
Pioneer Doctor Early in the New' Settlements — Their Heroism and Sacrifice —
Brilliant and Eminent Men in the Ranks of Wayne County Physicians —
Often Hard Work and Poor Pay — Early Treatment — Deceased Early Physi-
cians— Present-day Physicians.
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CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XVIII— RAILROADS, CANALS AND TURNPIKES 342
Legislative Enactment — The Ohio Canal — The Railroad Era — Mass-meetings
in the Interest of Railroads — Much Opposition, but Successful Outcome — Pitts-
burgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railroad — Other Railroads of Wayne County —
Navigating the Killbuck and Salt Creek — A Reminiscence.
CHAPTER XIX— TOWNSHIP HISTORY 353
Chippewa Township — First Settlements — Doylestown — Milton Township — First
Events — Towns of the Township — Fatal Boiler Explosion — Reminiscence by
Philip Fritz — Canaan Township — A Reminiscence by Isaac Notestine — Canaan
Academy — Congress Township — Pioneer Happenings — Congress Village — Ches-
ter Township — Earliest Settlers — Towns and Villages — Wayne Township —
The Pioneer Band — The Wasson Family — Greene Township — First Settlement
— Other Early Events — Smithville — Baughman Township — Marshallville — Fair-
view, or Burton City — Sugarcreek Township — Early Settlements — Towns and
Villages — Dalton — Sonneberg Settlement — East Union Township — An Early
Indian Scare — Recollections of Noah Brown — Towns of the Township — Wooster
Township — Benjamin Jones — Plain Township — First Settlers — Towns and
Villages — Remains of Buffaloes and Cedar Trees — Clinton Township — First
Happenings — Franklin Township — Indians Burn the Butler Cabin — The Mor-
gan Block House — Death of Old Chief Lyon — Moreland Village — Salt Creek
Township — Fredericksburg — Paint Township — Facts of Early History — Mount
Eaton — West Lebanon.
CHAPTER XX— MISCELLANEOUS SUBJECTS 391
Early-day Market Frices — Market Quotations for 1909 — First White Man to Die
in Wayne County — Two Noted Characters, Driskel and Brawdey — Weather
and Crops Years Ago — Adam Poe, the Indian Fighter — Poe Whips Five Indi-
ans— Concerning Adam Poe’s Death — Wayne County Man Hung Lincoln Con-
spirators— Salt Works on the Killbuck in 1815 — Population of Wayne County
by Decades — By Townships — City, Town and Village Population — City of
Wooster — Village Plats of the County— Indians Cause Powder Explosion —
The Fuller Sisters — An American “Ole Bull” — “Johnny Appleseed.”
CHAPTER XXI— THE CITY OF WOOSTER 410
Its Naming — Its Selection as County Seat — Location — First Events — Wooster
Incorporated — Election of March, 1824 — Entries in Record of Board of Trus-
tees— Town Presidents — Mayors of Wooster — Present City Officers — The Fire
Department — Wooster Opera Houses — The City Hall — Paving, Sidewalks and
Sewers — City Water Works — Wooster Gas Light Company — Electric Light
Plant — Wooster Postoffice — Board of Trade — Public Library — Old Market
House Destroyed by a Mob — Oak Hill Cemetery — Soldiers’ Monument — The
Metal Band Stand — Wooster Brush Works — Wooster Nursery Company — Pio-
neer Mill of Wayne County — Snowflake Flouring Mills — Other Industries —
Banks of Wooster — An Early Bank Failure — Building and Loan Companies —
Present Banks of Wooster — Public Schools — The Jacksonian Celebrations —
Wayne County’s Centennial Celebration — Days of Mourning in Wooster —
Deaths of Garfield and McKinley.
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CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XXn— UNIVERSITY OF WOOSTER 439
The Period of Inception and Preparation — Period of Experiment — Period of
Establishment — That of Maintenance — Period of Rapid Development — The
New Wooster — The Faculty — The Trustees — The Alumni — History by Depart-
ments— Those Which Have Disappeared — The Medical Department — The
Military Department — The Post-graduate Department — The Library — The
Preparatory Department — The Summer School — The Musical Department —
Homes for Children of Foreign Missionaries — The Florence H. Severance
Bible and Missionary Training School — Miscellany — Honorary Degrees — The
College Publications — The School of Expression — The Literary Societies —
Prizes and Honors — Vacations and Holidays — Dramatic Productions — Physical
Culture and Athletics — Fraternities and Sororities — Class Spirit — Discipline —
Co-education — Expenses — Department of Propaganda — Relations of the Uni-
versity to the City and County — A Prophecy.
CHAPTER XXIII— TOWNS OF THE COUNTY 652
Doylestown Village — Postoffice — Churches — Lodges and Societies — Industries
— Banking — Town of Creston — Postofflce — Incorporation — Banking — Town of
Orrville — Its Industries — Banking — Orrville Before the Civil War — An Orrville
Reminiscence — Village of Shreve — Officers — Postofflce — Churches and Lodges
— Industrial Concerns — Village of West Salem — Mayors and Town Officers —
Postal History — Various Industries — Churches and Lodges — Other Interests.
BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD 660
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HISTORICAL INDEX
A
Acreage of Wayne County 99
Adair, John S 297
Adam Poe, the Indian Fighter 397
Address of Lyman R. Critchlield . . . 103
Agricultural Experiment Station . . . 203
Agricultural Society, Wayne County 216
Agriculture 193
Agriculture, Future of 207
Agriculture, Progress of 195
Allen, Edward 1040
Altitudes in Wayne County
Amish Mennonite Church 270
Animal Remains in Swamps 34
An American “Ole Bull” 407
Apple Creek Presbyterian Church. . . . 261
Associate Judges 178
Artifacts of Aborigines 91
Attorneys, Prosecuting 183
Auditors, County 179
Average Crop Areas 203
B
Band Stand 426
Banks of Wooster 431, 434
Baptist Churches 241
Baptist Church, Milibrook 245
Battle of Falling Timbers 33
Battle of the Cow Pens 46
Battle of the Maumee 33
Battles, William S 334
Baughman Township 372
Beall’s Campaign 45
Bench and Bar 286
Bend Church 271
Big Killbuck 59
Bissell, Samuel Norton 327
Blachley, William B 333
Block Houses 219
Boiler Explosion 358
Boundaries of Wayne County, Early. 114
Boundaries, Wayne County, in 1808. 117
Brawdey, Steve 393
Building and Loan Companies 433
Burbank 362
Burials, Ancient 96
Burning of Butler Cabin 385
Burning of Colonel Crawford 42
Burton City 373
C
Campaigns 32
Canaan Academy 190
Canaan Lutheran Church 252
Canaan Township 360
Canaan Township Methodism 270
Canaan Township Presbyterians 260
Canals of Wayne County 342
Carlin, Eugene 298
Catholic Churches 272
Centennial Celebration 436
Centralization of Schools 191
Chester Township 366
Chief Killbuck 51
Chief Lyon, Death of 38G
Children's Home 128
Chippewa Township 353
Christian Church, Shreve 255
Church of Christ 254
Church of God 265
Church of God, Franklin Township. 266
Churches, Early 278
Churches of Wayne County 241
Circuit Court 177, 288
City of Wooster 410
Civil and Political History 130
Education 132
Revolutionary Purpose 132
The Constitution 133
Founders of Government 134
Indian Government 136
Organized Government 141
Territorial Council 141
Territorial Legislature 142
Early Laws 142
Constitution of 1802 143
Elective Franchise of Constitution
of 1802 144
City of Wooster.. 146
Township and Town Government. 147
Early Method of Enforcing Law.. 151
Professional influences 151
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HISTORICAL INDEX.
Constitution of 1851 153
Influence of Party Organization... 154
Heredity of Governing Capacity ... 155
Forty Years of Government 157
Wayne County as the Source of
Northwestern Government 101
Individual and Social Life 102
Great Principles of the Pioneer
Fathers and Mothers 103
Wayne and Associate Counties Pro-
lific of Great Men 172
Civil War, Wayne County and the. . . 223
Clerks of Common Pleas Court 178
Clinton Township 382
Coal Mines 1U5
Coe, Silas N 300
Colonel Crawford 37
Commissioners, County 130
Common Pleas Court 177
Common Pleas Court, Clerks of 178
Company D, Eighth Ohio Regiment. 238
Composition of Soil 08
Congregational Church 378
Congressional Representatives 174
Congress Township 302
Congress Village 305
Connecticut Western Reserve 110
Constitutional Convention, Members. 174
Cornell, Lorenzo 305
County Auditors 179
County Commissioners 180
County Government 132
County Infirmary 137
County Office Buildings... 120
County Recorders 183
County Seat, First 122
County Surveyors 182
County Treasurers 178
Court House History 123
Cow Pens, Battle of the 40
Crawford, Colonel, Burning of 42
Crawford, Colonel William 37
Crawford’s Expedition 30
Creston 554
Creston "Journal” 320
Creston Methodist Episcopal Church 271
Critchfleld, Lyman R 292
Critchfleld, Lyman R., Address by.. 103
Critchfleld, Lyman R., Jr 295
Critchfleld, Reno H 299
Crop Areas, Average 203
D
Dalton 374
Dalton “Gazette” 319
Dalton United Presbyterian Church. 2b'4
Day, Stephen F 320
Days of Mourning 437
Death of Old Chief Lyon 380
Delawares 47
Disciple Church, Plain Township.... 255
Dohrman’s Tract 20
Doylestown 355, 552
Doylestown Industries 553
Doylestown “Journal” 320
Doylestown Postoffice 553
Downing, D. T 298
Drainage, Preglacial 07
Driskel, John 3113
E
Early Boundaries of Wayne County 114
Early Churches 278
Early Counties, Organization of 29
Early-day Market Prices 391
Early Ohio Villages and Towns.... 30
Early Prosecuting Attorneys 289
Early Settlement of Wayne County.. 108
Early Territorial Days 28
Eason, Benjamin 30i
Eason, Samuel B 294
East Union Township 375
Educational History 185
Eighth Ohio Regiment 238
Enclosures 88
English Claim Northwest Territory. 18
English Lutheran Mission Church.. 253
Episcopal Church 200
Evangelical Association 254
Evangelical Church, West Lebanon. 253
Evangelical Churches 254
Evangelical Lutheran Christ Church 251
Evangelical Lutheran Church 252
Experiment Station, Agricultural... 203
F
Fairview 373
Falling Timbers, Battle of 33
Farmers Club, Plain Township 21T
Fatal Boiler Explosion 358
Fenwick, Bishop, Death of 274
Firestone, Leander 329
Firestone, W. W 330
First Council 34
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HISTORICAL INDEX.
First County Seat 122
First English Settlement 18
First House of Representatives 34
First Methodist Church, Wooster 266
First Presbyterian Church, Wooster. 256
First Schools 188
First Settlement at Marietta 24
First Settlements in Wayne County. 112
First Soldier Wounded from Wayne
County 237
First Survey of Public Lands 24
First Territorial Officers 28
First Volunteers 224
First White Man to Die in Wayne
County 392
Forest Trees 99
Former Members of Wayne County
Bar Practicing Elsewhere 301
Fort Harmar, Treaty of 27
Fortifications 88
Fort Recovery 33
Forty-First Ohio Regiment 231
Fourth Ohio Regiment 226
Fox Lake 102
Franklin Township 384
Franklin Township Methodism 271
Fraternal Societies 281
Fredericksburg 387
Fredericksburg Methodist Episcopal
Church 270
Fredericksburg United Presbyterian
Church 264
Freemasonry 280
French Grant 25
French Settlement Church 274
Fuller Sisters 405
Future of Agriculture 207
G
Gallagher, Joseph 298
General Features of Wayne County. 98
General Rellquia 94
General Representation from Wayne
County 176
General St. Clair 33
Geology of District . 80
Glaciation in Wayne County 69
Grand Army of the Republic 285
Greene Township 369
Greene Township Presbyterians 261
Greenville Treaty Line 115
H
Hay, Benton G 298
Hubbell, Harvey H 299
Human Relics 77
I
Implements of Aborigines 91
Improved Order of Red Men 284
Independent Order of Odd Fellows.. 282
Indiana Territory 35
Indian Chiefs 87
Indian Massacre 52
Indian Trails 50
Indian Treaties 27
Indian Tribes 32
Indians Cause Powder Explosion 405
Indians, Latest Tribes 47
Indians of Wayne County 50, 85
Infirmary Directors 183
Infirmary, Wayne County 127
J
Jacksonian Celebration 436
Jacob’s Lutheran Church, Franklin
Township 254
Jails of Wayne County 124
“Johnny Appleseed” 407
Jones, Charles C 300
Judges of Common Pleas Court.. 177, 288
K
Keeler, Thomas B 294
Killbuck, Indian Chief 51
Killbuck Swamp 104
Knights of Honor 285
Knights of Pythias 283
L
Lakes and Swamps 74, 102
Latest Tribes of Indians 47
Lattasburg 367
Lawyers of 1812 289
Lawyers Who Died While Members
of the Wayne County Bar 304
Lawyers Who Were Members of the
Wayne County Bar and Died Else-
where 309
Legislative Representatives 175
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HISTORICAL INDEX.
London Company 18
Lutheran Church, Plain Township.. 253
Lutherans in Plain Township 252
Me
McClure, Addison S 292
McKinney, John R 299
M
Maag, Edward 298
Marietta, First Settlement at 24
Market House Destroyed 423
Market Prices, Early Day 391
Market Quotations for 1909 390
Marshallville 372
Marshallville Presbyterian Church.. 260
Masons, Free and Accepted 280
Massacre of Sixteen Indians 52
Maumee, Battle of the 33
Mayors of Wooster 415
Medical Profession 322
Meech, James B 296
Mennonite Church, Amish 276
Mennonite Church, Salem 277
Mennonite Church, Sonneberg Swiss. 274
Mennonite Church, Sugarcreek Town-
ship 276
Methodist Episcopal Church 266
Methodist Episcopal Church, Cres-
ton 271
Methodist Episcopal Church, Fred-
ericksburg 270
Methodist Episcopal Church, Orrville 272
Metz, Asbury Durbin 295
Mexican War, Wayne County in 221
Military Campaigns 32, 36
Military History of Wayne County.. 219
Military Lands 25, 26
Miller, George W 297
Milton Township 356
Milton Township Catholic Church... 273
Moccasin Last Stone 78
Moore, W. C 328
Moravian Lands 26
Moreland Village 386
Morgan Block House 385
Morr, John C 298
Mounds 90
Mount Eaton 389
Mullins, Walter J 300
N
Name of Wayne County, Origin of.. 121
Navigation 349
New France 13
Newkirk, Eugene W 294
Newman’s Creek Swamp.... 103
Newspapers of Wayne County 312
Ninth Ohio Cavalry Regiment 236
Northwest Territory 17
O
Oak Hill Cemetery 423
Odd Fellows 282
Office Buildings, County 126
Ohio Canal 342
Ohio Company 18
“Ohio Spectator” 312
Old Mohican 4 66
One Hundred and Second Ohio Regi-
ment 234
One Hundred and Seventh Ohio Regi-
ment 235
One Hundred and Twentieth Ohio
Regiment 232
Ordinance of 1787 19
Organization of Early Counties 29
Organization of Ohio Land Company 21
Organization of Townships 118
Organization of Wayne County 114
Origin of Name of Wayne County.. 121
Original Squatters 20
Orrville 556
Orrville “Courier” 319
Orrville “Crescent” 318
Orrville Industries 557
Orrville Methodist Episcopal Church 272
Orrville Presbyterian Church 260
Orrville Reminiscence 559
P
Paint Township 388
Paintville Presbyterian Church 262
Patton’s Lake 103
Pecklnpaugh, Thomas W 298
Pensioners of War of 1812 221
Pensioners, Revolutionary 220
Physicians, Early-day 325
Physicians, Present-day 339
Pigeon Roost 76
Digitized by Google
HISTORICAL INDEX.
Pioneer Families 113
Pioneer Mill of Wayne County...... 428
Pioneers, Where From 108, 195
Plain Township 380
Plain Township Disciples Church... 255
Plain Township Farmers’ Club 217
Plymouth Company 18
Poe, Adam 397
Population by City, Towns and Vil-
lages 403
Population by Townships 403
Population in 1787 20
Population of Wayne County 403
Population of Wooster 403
Pottery 95
Prairies 102
Preglacial Drainage G7
Preglacial Topography 57
Presbyterian Church, Apple Creek.. 261
Presbyterian Church, Marshal lvil le. . 260
Presbyterian Church, Orrville 260
Presbyterian Church, Paintville. . . . 262
Presbyterian Church, Sugarcreek . . . 260
Presbyterian Church, Westminster.. 259
Presbyterian Church, Wooster, First 256
Presbyterians in Canaan Township.. 260
Presbyterians in Greene Township.. 261
Present-day Lawyers 292
Present-day Physicians 339
Probate Judges 180
Primitive Schools . 185
Production of Crops
197, 198, 199, 200, 201
Process of Agriculture 195
Progressive Farmers’ Association... 217
Property Valuation 129
Prosecuting Attorneys 183, 289
Public School System 187
Public Schools of Wooster 434
R
Railroad Era 343
Railroads of Wayne County 342
Ramsey, Warren 297
Recorders, County 183
Red Men, Improved Order of 284
Reformed Church, Canaan Township 250
Reformed Church, East Union Town-
ship 250
Reformed Church, Marshallville. .... 249
Reformed Church, Milton Township. 250
Reformed Church, Orrville 249
Reformed Church, Wooster 245, 249
Reformed Lutheran Church, St.
Paul’s 253
Refugee Tract 26
Reminiscence by Philip Fritz 358
Representatives in Congress 174
Representatives in Legislature 175
Revolutionary Pensioners 220
Rider, Cyrus A 301
Robison, James D 331
Royal Arcanum 284
Russell, Price 295
S
St. Clair, General 33
St. James Episcopal Church 266
St. Michael’s Catholic Church 273
St. Paul’s Reformed Lutheran Church 253
Sts. Peter and Paul’s Catholic Church 273
Salem Lutheran Church, Plain Town-
ship 252
Salem Mennonite Church 277
Salt Creek Township 386
Salt Works on the Killbuck 402
School Statistics 190
School System, Public 187
Schools at Shreve 189
Schools, Primitive 185
Schools, Rural, Centralization of 191
Second Baptist Church, Wooster 245
Second Grade of Territorial Govern-
ment 34
Second Survey of Public Lands 24
Second Territorial Government 28
Senators 175
Settlements, First, in Wayne County 112
Shaffer, Hiram M 338
Shaffer, Moses 337
Shawnees 49
Sheriffs • 180
Shreve 5603
Shreve Christian Church 255
Shreve “News” 321
Shreve Schools 189
Sixteenth Ohio Regiment 228
Smith, Harry R 296
Smithville 371
Smlthville High School 188
Digitized by boogie
HISTORICAL INDEX.
Smyser, Martin L 294
Snyder, James E 300
Soil Composition 9o
Soil of Wayne County 193
Soldiers’ Monument 420
Sonneberg Settlement 375
Sonneberg Swiss Mennonite Church. 274
Spanish-American War 238
Spooner, M. L 297
Starn, George A 298
State Senators 175
Stone, Edgar E 297
Streams of Wayne County 100
Sugarcreek Presbyterian Church.... 200
Sugarcreek Township 373
Sugarcreek Township Mennonite
Church 270
Surface of County 101
Surveyors, County 182
Surveys of Public Lands 24
Symmes Purchase 24
T
Territorial Council, First 34
Territorial Days 28
Territorial Government Ended 30
Territorial Legislature, Third Session 35
Territorial Officers 28
The "Mayflower” 23
Third Session, Territorial Legisla-
ture 35
Thomas, Alfred J 299
Topography, Preglacial 57
Topography of Wayne County 98
Township Histories 353
Townships, Organization of 118
Trails, Indian 50
Treasurers, County 178
Treaties with Indians 27
Treaty of Fort Harmar 27
Trees of Wayne County 99
Trinity English Lutheran Church... 254
Trinity Methodist Church, Wooster. 269
Turnpikes of Wayne County 342
Two Noted Characters 392
U
United Presbyterian Church 2G2
United Presbyterian Church, Dalton. 262
United Presbyterian Church, Freder-
icksburg 264
United States Military Lands 26
University of Wooster 438
V
Valuation of Property 129
Village Plats 404
Village Sites 93
Virginia Military Lands 25
Volunteers, First 224
W
Warner, Charles J 336
Water Navigation 349
Wayne County Agricultural Society. 216
Wayne County Boundaries, 1808 117
Wayne County Early Boundaries.... 114
Wayne County Indian Trails 50
Wayne County in Mexican War 221
Wayne County Jails 124
Wrayne County Lawyers 292
Wayne County, Organization of.... 114
Wayne County Organized 118
Wayne Presbyterian Church 261
Wayne Township 368
Weather and Crops Years Ago 396
Wertz, Ed. S 299
Welker, Martin 293
Wenger, D 296
West Lebanon 390
WTest Lebanon Evangelical Church.. 253
Westminster Presbyterian Church.. 259
West Salem 560c.
West Salem "Reporter” 320
Western Reserve 25, 116
"Widow Blockhouse” Gets Married. 430
Wiley, Aquila 300
Wooster Board of Trade 421
Wooster Brush Works 426
Wooster City Hall 418
Wooster. City of 410
Wooster City Water Works 418
Wooster "Daily News” 316
Wooster "Democrat” 315
Wooster, Election of 1824 413
Wooster Electric Light Plant 420
Wooster, Fire Department 416
Wooster Gas Light Company 419
Wooster Incorporated 412
Digitized by boogie
HISTORICAL INDEX.
Wooster "Journal and Democratic
Times" 313
Wooster, Mayors of 415
Wooster Nursery Company 427
Wooster Opera Houses 417
Wooster, Population of 403
Wooster Postoffice 421
Wooster, Present City Officers 415
Wooster Public Library 422
Wooster Public Schools 434
Wooster "Republican" 313
Wooster, Town Presidents 414
Wooster Township 379
Wooster University 438
Wyandots 48
Y
Yocum, Charles M 395
Yost, William C 396
Z
Zion’s Evangelical Lutheran Church,
Wooster 250
Digitized by boogie
Digitized by
BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX
A
Adair Family 560”
Adair, Robert L 560”
Addleman, William 856
Alcock, Forbes 1284
Alexander, A. S 1250
Alexander, Samuel K 1262
Ames, Samuel S 579
Amstutz, David C 874
Amstutz Family 1386
Amstutz, Joel B 953
Anthony, Frederick 1214
Appleman, Robert S 582
Appleman, William 582
Armstrong, David Calvin 1208
Armstrong, David D 804
Armstrong, Joseph 960
Armstrong, Thomas, Jr 880
Aukerman, Louis Emerson 1063
Ault, Clement L 929
B
Baker, Harry E 1404
Barden, Edwin Albert 1128
Barden, William 1379
Barden, William A 1374
Barnard, George D 1108
Barnard, Martin H 1130
Barnhart, William Ralph, Jr 1436
Beal, David 1380
Beals, Daniel 853
Beals, Jacob 854
Beazell, Matthew 827
Bechtel, John 734
Bechtel, Tillman 0 1243
Beckley, Conrad Rumple 576
Beekley, Charles Elmer 1094
Beer, James Dinsmore 618
Bell, William 894
Berger, John David 865
Bertolette, Harry B 995
Bevington, Benjamin S 730
Biddle, Charles W 1125
Bldle, George C 1010
Bixler, William 1351
Blackwood, David G 749
Bliss, William Herbert 587
Blosser, P. S 802
Blough, David 5604T
Bolen, Charles Wesley 584
Boor, John N 600
Bower, Adam B. 1167
Bowman, David 1292
Bowman, Theo. P 653
Braden, David H 646
Brenizer, George 1364
Brenneman, Amandus W 1366
Brenneman, Daniel Webster 1042
Brenneman, Samuel M 792
Brinkerhoff, Amos 1154
Brinkerhoff, Ira 892
Brinkerhoff, Joseph W 1184
Brooks, A. A 678
Brown, Allen 1000
Brown, Elmer 780
Brown, Joseph McCauley 1032
Brown, Thomas Pendleton 1079
Bruce, Oliver D 764
Bryson, Willis B 1268
Buchanan, John W 1002
Bucher, Levi 1156
Burchfield, Charles E 794
Burkholder, Amos 979
Burkholder, Elmer TJ 1222
Burkholder, Noah S 951
Burkholder, Simon D 1171
Burkholder, William 937
C
Cameron, Robert, Sr 660
Campbell, Alexander Thompson... 742
Campbell, Archibald B 654
Camron, W. J 1398
Carnahan, Thomas E 955
Case, S. Grant 1411
Caskey, John Snodgrass 624
Digitized by boogie
BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX.
Caskey, William 829
Christy, James W 636
Christy, Raymond F 708
Christy, Welker G 635
Coffman, Henry 1150
Conrad, John C 815
Cook, Sylvanus G 738
Cooney, Nelson R 1209
Cope, B. G 1272
Cramer, John 850
Cramer, William Albert 1100
Crane, Cyrus G 1462
Crater, George 1162
Craven, John 1176
Criley, John M 967
Critchfield, Mrs. Adelaide M 56012
Critchfield, Lyman R 560*
Critchfield, Lyman R., Jr 704
Crosby, Howard 1152
Crummel, John W 775
Curry, David C 1320
Cutter, John W 728
D
Dague, Gabriel C 1328
Dague, Thomas Jefferson 1424
Danford, John H. B 599
Davis, Thomas Kirby 56044
Dawson, Norman B 938
DesVoignes, W. L 701
Deuell, William Henry 878
Dix, Albert 796
Dohner, Harvey B 932
Douglas, Ben 1080
E
Eason, Samuel Brown 832
Emrich, George P 1115
Etling, Abram 1439
Etling, John E 1352
Evans, David G 783
Evans, William S 787
Ewing, Thomas E 860
Eyman, Charles B 1023
Evman, Simon B 1337
F
Fahr, Charles 750
Fair, Andrew A 1232
Feeman, William E 668
Felton. A. K 1225
Ferguson, James Walter 1134
Fetzer, Jonathan 1302
Fike, Adam W 694
Fike, George A 1180
Fike, William A 1181
Fisher, George A 1256
Fisher, James Howard 1016
Flack, Robert C 784
Fluhart, Edmond Z 688
Fogel, Adam 732
Folsom, Charles E 1460
Forrer, George F 1283
Forrer, Henry H 1203
France, John B 569
Franks, Louis K 1419
Frary, Orange W 884
Frary, William 760
Frick, Jacob 1376
Fritz, Joseph Owen 658
Fulton, Luther H 1133
Funck, Ross W 1440
Funk, Laban 1005
Funk, Willis D 1310
G
Garver, William Wallace 936
Gaut, Mathew 768
Gearhart, Jacob 926
Geiselman, Cyrenius 1173
Geiselman. John Franklin 1065
George, Franklin Warren 680
Gerig, Benjamin 1143
Gerlach, Albert 590
Gilbert, E. E 1227
Gill, Samuel George 1280
Gill, William M . 1250
Gindlesperger, James B 746
Gish, Jacob 945
Gish, Michael S 944
Good, Clayton 747
Graber, Charles A 1331
Graber, Daniel 1045
Graber, Rudolph 1258
Grady, Oliver George 869
Grant, Edward M 810
Graven, Marion 614
Graven, Thomas Arthur 613
Gray, Charles Milton 567
Gray, James Lloyd 607
Gregory, Joseph B 1319
Grosjean, Louis Eugene 1086
Digitized by boogie
BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX.
H
Hackenberg, Adam 1453
Haller, Henry A 674
Halteman, Ammon S 966
Hamilton, James A 676
Hamlin, Simon 1254
Hammer, Jacob J 1348
Hard, Curtis Volosco 800
Harrison, John F 625
Harrison, Ohio J 786
Harrison, Richard 759
Harrison, Stephen 626
Ilarrold, Christopher John 638
Hartel, John V 1332
Hartzler, Albert 1 1139
Hartzler, Gideon 957
Hartzler, John 1053
Haskins, Benjamin Edward 943
Haupert, Charles 913
Hay, Benton Givler 1384
Heckman, Frank 791
Heckman, Jacob 1255
Heller, A. J 690
Heller, William E 675
Henry, Stephen M 824
Herman, Adam George 1336
Hills, Oscar Armstrong 1334
Hoegner, William F 1446
Hofacre, Alonzo Lawrence 1097
Hoff, Daniel 1341
Hohenshil, David 1295
Holmes, Franklin 864
Hooke, Joseph William 725
Horn, Alonzo D 1375
Horn, C. Willis 1014
Hostetler, David 814
Hostetler, John B 812
Hostetler, Jonathan K 1174
Hostetler, Levi F 806
Hostetter, Joseph Warren 740
Hostettler, William 1358
Hough, Isaac N 604
Housel, Peter 770
Houser, John H 1211
Hubbell, Will Herman 1437
Huffman, Daniel V 948
Hunsicker, T. C 1451
Hunter, Wellrose 1355
I
Irvin, George H 682
J
Jackson, George 1236
Jacot, William 1021
James, David 752
Jeffries, Lemuel P 1136
Jennings, Henry 996
Jones, Lake F 1408
Jontz, Joseph 1048
Jordan, Willard Brown 1050
K
Karch, Frederick 964
Kaufman, Oscar David 1140
Kaufman, Thomas Johnson 1096
Kean, Olin Lee 1040
Kean, William F 1240
Keck, D. B 1218
Kepler, Benjamin F 1431
Kersteter, Samuel 1109
Kister, John A 1378
Knepp, Henry Milton 629
Knight, Lyman C 1395
Koebler, John P 1030
Kollert, Charles J 1220
Rosier, William D 1360
Kountz, Harry 798
Krick, Charles 578
Krick, Jacob 1076
Krick, Philip 1252
L
Lance, Andrew J 1400
Lance, Edwin 1339
Lance, James . ! 1443
I.ance, Milward 1047
Landes, Elmer S 593
Landis, George 1036
LaViers, William N 952
Lawrence, Abbott 1069
Lawrence, Mrs. David 1172
Lawrence, Martin 1224
Lehr, Joseph Wellington 620
Leickheim, Max J 710
Leiner, Daniel 1019
Lewis, William A 1248
Lindsey, Harvey 1146
Litsinger, Thomas H 1077
Long, William L 588
lxmgenecker, H. F * 1382
Longenecker, Samuel B 1119
Digitized by LjOOQie
BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX,
Lowe, John Jacob 756
Lupoid, Robert L 724
Me
McCance, Hiram 1061
McClaran, John C 1264
McConahay, Hugh 1448
McConnell, David W 1346
McFadden, Howard Roy 1039
McGuff, John 950
Mcllvaine, Daniel W 922
Mcllvaine, David E 672
Mcllvaine, George A 871
Mclntire, Ezra D 656
McIntyre, Gilbert D 663
McMillen, DeWitt Howard 719
McSweeney, John, Jr 720
M
Marsh, L. Cody 1028
Marthey, Joseph Peter 1102
Martin, John 1164
Mateer, Horace Nelson 642
Matty, Samuel 1060
Meech, James B 632
Meese, Ira F 1444
Meier, Hugh M 797
Meier, James 616
Meier, John 608
Mellinger, Benedict 876
Mellinger Family 876
Mellinger, Melchor 876
Mellinger, William M 863
Messner, John 858
Metsker, Eli 925
Mettetal, Charles Elmer 1082
Miller, Jacob A 992
Miller, John H 1127
Miller, Joseph 1188
Miller, Joseph 941
Miller, M. M 931
Miller, Samuel Harrison 648
Minier, James B 1416
Molne, Charles R 1347
Moine, Julius 1315
Moomaw, R. M 1025
Morgan, Joshua H 918
Morganroth, William 1407
Morlan, Micajah Milo 727
Moser, David P 1104
Moser, Jacob A 1015
Mougey, Forest 1430
Mougey, Peter 1434
Munson, Charles 762
Munson, Isaac 763
Musser, William 1012
Mussleman, David W 1463
Myers, David 610
Myers, Elmer F 887
Myers, Isaac A 1363
Myers, John A 560”
Myers, William C....* 650
N
Neumeyer, Frederick W 1189
Neuroth, Charles 970
Nirode, William Franklin 1072
Nolin, John Bunyan 627
Nolt, Samuel A 1213
O
Odenkirk, Homer B 1413
Oldman, Willey Sylvester 831
Oldroyd, Asbury B 771
Orr, Abner G 1204
Orr, Clinton M 890
Orr, Dudley S 1356
Orr, Smith, 560”
Orr, Thomas W 1238
Otto, Michael D 1267
P
Peake, Henry A 1393
Perllstein, Joseph 847
Peterman, Andrew Jackson 664
Pfeiffer, George 1299
Pinkley, Orlando George 1124
Piper, H. Lincoln 1263
Piper, William 1293
Plasterer, George W 928
Pontius, Isaac 684
Porter, Harvey 1433
Power, James B 1106
Putnam, James Bedell 1279
Q
Quinby, Edward M 808
R
Ramseyer, Daniel 985
Raudebaugh, John A 1317
Digitized by boogie
BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX.
Rehm, Andrew J 1183
Rehm, George W 1457
Rehm, Jacob 1197
Rehm, Jacob F 1230
Rehm, John W 692
Reinhardt, John F 1349
Rice, T. E 686
Rickabaugh, Francis Lee 1044
Rlckabaugh, George 1381
Rlckel, Michael 1131
Rleder, Cyrus A 836
Ries, William Nicholas 56031
Rittenhouse, Joseph H 1245
Ross, William F 562
Ross, William Howard 562
Rouch, Mahlon 1401
Royer, Joslah F 1290
Rudy, Albert M *..... 1371
Rudy, Clyde E 1396
Rudy, Daniel L 998
Rudy, David 1361
Rudy, Guy M 1367
Rudy, Levi S 1357
Rumbaugh, Miller 1 1308
Ryland, Ai 1314
S
Sanborn, Joseph G 988
Sanderson, Amos 698
Sanderson, John C 1073
Saurer, Albert S 630
Saurer, Arty C 826
Schauff, Frank E 1434
Schmid, Rudolph 1027
Schmuck, Samuel 1112
Schollenberger, H. A 1219
Schorger, John 1343
Schorle, Jacob 956
Schultz, John C 1233
Scott, James Cutter 1008
Seas, J. F 702
Seelye, William James 56023
Seiberling, J. H 744
Seigley, John M 971
Sell, Charles R 560<#
Sell, Jacob 883
Sell, W. Frank 882
Serfass, Andrew 1344
Shamp, James A 571
Shank, Charles M 1034
Shank, William W 1455
Shelly, Jacob 1261
Shelly, James Garfield 1249
Sheppard, John Wesley 1312
Sherck, Joseph 754
Sherrick, Joseph S 667
Shibler, Jacob S 821
Shie, David P 867
Shilling, Jesse R 1166
Shisler, John W 823
Sidle, Lucurtis P 670
Sigler, Henry P. 1449
Slemmons, David 1 935
Smedley, Lehman J 1020
Smith, Benjamin H 1148
Smith, Cyrus D 574
Smith, Robert J 580
Smucker, Jonas 982
Smyser, Harmon 1330
Smyser, Martin L 560M
Snavely, Chris. R 1335
Snure, Jacob C 980
Snyder, John Robert 1068
Soliday, L. Lyman 1303
Soliday, Sidney Grant 1064
Solliday, William A 991
Sommer, Daniel A 1372
Souers, Solomon 1084
Spangler, Wesley 1024
Spear, Wesley Wells 568
Spencer, Ezra R 1286
Stahl, John V 1414
Stair, Frederick 1091
Stair, Irvin 0 1011
Stam, Jacob 1054
Steel, Ephraim J 820
Steele, Enoch 977
Steele, William 1340
Steele, Wilson 976
Steiner, Daniel 973
Steiner, John S 1458
Steiner, ITlrich 1178
Stepfleld, Alexander E 920
Stewart, Frank E 700
Stitt, James T 1144
Stout, Daniel S 592
Strauss, Henry H 5 603*
Studer, Benjamin 1056
Studer, L. S 790
Studer, Rudolph 1326
Swanson, Swen A 1142
Swart, Adrian C.. 1111
Digitized by boogie
BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX.
Swartz Family 716
Swartz, Hiram B 712
Swartz, Samuel 716
Swinehart, Benjamin F 1323
Swinehart, John 1 1307
T
Taggart, Frank 560’a
Taggart, James 1200
Taggart, Samuel M 706
Taggert, John William 1158
Tate, Michael 1160
Tate, William 1168
Tawney, Philip G 1368
Taylor, Charles E 1324
Taylor, James B 5604t
Taylor, Kaiser W 1122
Thompson, Ervin W 696
Thorne, Charles Embree 1316
Todd, J. H 840
Tschantz, John H 1092
Tuttle, Augustus S 933
V
Van Nest, M. M 560^
Vanover, Francis Marion 1296
Villard, John Heinrich 968
W
Wagner, Henry 1452
Wagner, Orrin 1454
Walter, Albert P 984
Ward, James M 848
Warfel, David H 1353
Wasson. Rezin B 1274
Wayne County Democrat Co 1399
Weaver, David J 1191
Weaver, Thomas A 1259
Weidman, Jesse H 959
Weiker, Peter 872
W'eiser, Charles A 564
Wells, Uriah F 765
Weltmer, James A 1270
Welty, Andrew J 1327
Welty, Peter 838
Wenger, David 1206
Wenger, Emanuel H 1241
Wenger, Frederick 1195
Wertenberger, Orlow H 1304
Wertz, Edwin S. 1088
Wertz, William H. H 888
Weygandt, William Edwin 560Ti
Wheeler, Warden 776
White. William F 947
Whitmore, Charles Wesley 1192
Whorton, Robert 1246
Wiler, William Henry 1159
Wiley, Aquila 736
Wiley, John H 1300
Williams, O. C 585
Winkler, Wesley J 1288
Wintersteen, Henry C 1311
Wintersteen, William F 1199
Wood, Samuel 1216
Woodward, Davis Dempsey 1291
Wooster Nursery Company....... 860
Wooster Public Library 1117
Worst, William Henry 640
Wright, Elmer Francis 940
Wright, William Henry 1037
Wyer, Christian A. 1392
Y
Yarger, James A 1006
Yocum, Lincoln A 816
Yocum, Ohio M 633
Yoder, Christian Z 1228
Yoder, John A 1278
Yoder, Menno Peter 1057
Young, George M 1459
Z
Zaring, James Lee 56014
Zaugg, Wesley Henry 5604*
Zimmerman, Ezekiel B 1410
Zimmerman, John W 1422
Zimmerman, Nathan R 1421
Digitized by CjOOQie
Digitized by
WAYNE COUNTY COURT HOUSE
HISTORICAL.
CHAPTER I.
THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY.
The discovery of what is now known as North America, by Se-
bastian Cabot in 1498, was at a time when no white man had probably trod-
den upon the soil of this country. It was the empire, as is generally believed,
of the native American, a barbaric people who roamed not unlike the wild
beasts of the field over its extensive domain, all untamed and ungovemed
by any regular type of civilized, Christianized life. The discoveries of both
Columbus and Cabot opened up the immigration for the European countries.
Soon Spain, England and France — the great rival nations — vied one with
the other for possession and final occupancy of the New World.
It was Spain that had the distinction of being the founder of the first
colony in North America, the same being established at St. Augustine, Flor-
ida, in 1565, it being by forty years the most aged city in the United States.
The second colony was planted by the French people in 1604, at Port
Royal, in Acadia, the original name of Nova Scotia. The third settle-
ment was effected by the English at Jamestown, Virginia, in the month
of April, 1607, the first English settlement on the continent.
The French people had commenced to make rapid strides toward settle-
ment and naturally England soon became alarmed at the French encroach-
ments in the north part of the new-found world, as then known and styled.
Hence the country was divided into two grand divisions, that portion lying
between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth degrees of northern latitude, and
James I by grant disposed of that portion of the country included between
the forty-fourth and forty-first degrees to an association of merchants, called
the London Land Company, and to the Plymouth Company, which later set-
tled New England, between the thirty-eighth and forty-fifth degrees. The
Cabots had visited Nova Scotia as earlv as 1498, though there was no
(2)
Digitized by boogie
i8
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
European colony established until the above named, but Henry IV of France
had as early as 1603 granted Acadia to De Monts, a Frenchman, and his
followers, and some Jesuits, who for a number of years tried to form a
settlement in Port Royal and St. Croix, but who were finally expelled from
the country by the English governor and colonists of Virginia, who claimed
the country by right of discovery of Sebastian Cabot. The grant to De
Monts comprised the lands between the fortieth and forty-sixth degrees of
latitude, and hence included the lands at present composing the state of Ohio.
The grant of James I of England to the London Company also em-
braced Ohio, and the grant of the same monarch to the Plymouth Company
compassed a portion of it. France, much desiring to hold sway and possess
this domain, sent forth her boldest adventurers to explore and really possess
the country in question. Among these men may be mentioned La Salle,
Champlain and Marquette. Forts were built by them on the lakes and the
Mississippi, Illinois, Maumee and Wabash rivers, and the whole Northwest
Territory was included by them in the province of Louisiana. In brief, ac-
cording to the geographers the entire country was known as New France,
except that eajst of the great ranges of mountains whose streams flow into
the Atlantic ocean, and of this portion they even claimed the basin of the
Kennebec and all of Maine to the east of that valley. As early as 1720 they
had strong and well fortified posts on the Wabash river, and a line of com-
munication was established to Acadia by way of this stream, the lakes and
the St. Lawrence. The English not only claimed the Northwest Territory
by reason of discovery and by grant of the King of England, but by virtue
of the purch’ase of the same from the Indians by treaty at Lancaster, in 1744.
By that treaty the Six Nations ceded the territory to the English, as they
claimed. For the purpose of formally possessing it and vying with the
French in its settlement, a company, denominated the Ohio Company, was
organized in 1750 and during that year obtained a grant from the British
Parliament for six hundred thousand acres of land on or near the Ohio river,
and in 1750 the English built and established a trading post — “trading
house” — at a place called Loramie’s Store, on the Great Miami river, and
which was the first English establishment erected in the Northwest Territory,
or in the great Mississippi valley. In the early part of 1752 the French
demolished this trading house and carried the inhabitants oflf to Canada.
This brought on somewhat of a conflict, and the Ottawas and Chippeways
assisting the French, fourteen of the Indian warriors were killed and many
more wounded before the affair was adjusted.
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It was in 1762 that the Moravian missionaries, Post and Heckwelder,
had established a station upon the Muskingum river. One year later the
French ceded their possessions in the Northwest and, indeed, in North
America, to Great Britain, and from that time forward the English had
only the natives with whom to contend. After many conflicts had ensued
and much blood and precious life had been lost, the English became masters
of the soil. In 1774, by act of Parliament of the English government, the
whole of the Northwest Territory was annexed to and made a part of the
province of Quebec.
July 4, 1776, the colonists declared their independence and renounced
further allegiance to the British crown, and each colony then claimed juris-
diction over the soil embraced within its charter. The Revolutionary war
terminating favorably to the American colonies, the King of England, Sep-
tember 3, 1783, ceded all claim to the Northwest Territory of the United
States. By charter, Virginia claimed that portion of the territory which was
situated northwest of the river Ohio, but in 1784 she ceded all claim to the
territory to the United States. By virtue of this act or deed of cession the
General Assembly of Virginia did, through her delegates in Congress March
1, 1784, “convey (in the name of and for and on behalf of the said com-
monwealth), transfer, assign and make over unto the United States, in
Congress assembled, for the benefit of said states, Virginia included, all
right and title and claim, as well of soil as of jurisdiction, to the territory
of said state lying and being to the northwest of the river Ohio.,,
After this great northwestern domain had been secured to the United
States, Congress directed measures toward the permanent organization of
civil government in the same, it now being within the legitimate province of
its legislation. July 13, 1787, Congress passed “An Ordinance for the Gov-
ernment of the Territory of the United States, Northwest of the Ohio river/'
the same being styled “the Ordinance of 1787." This was made the supreme
law of the territory, and from its principles grew all further legislation.
The ordinance referred to provided that the territory should be divided
into not less than three nor more than five states, as soon as Virginia should
alter her acts of cession and the proper bounds should be fixed. The west-
ern state in such territory should be bounded by the Ohio, Mississippi and
Wabaish rivers; a direct line from the Wabash at Port Vincent due north
to the territorial line between the United States and Canada, and by said line
direct to the Lake of the Woods and the Mississippi. The middle state was
fixed by a direct line from the Wabash at Port Vincent, to the Ohio, by the
Ohio, by a direct line drawn due north from the mouth of the Miami to
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
the said territorial line. The eastern state was fixed as by the last named
direct line, the Ohio and Pennsylvania, and to the said territorial line. Pro-
vision was, however, made that two other states might be made from the
territory by Congress; further that when any one of these states has sixty
thousand people that it might be admitted into the Union as a state and
no longer be under a territorial government.
Article six of the ordinance provided that “There shall be neither slav-
ery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the
punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted;
provided, always, that any person escaping into the same from whom labor
and service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original states, such fugi-
tive may be lawfully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his
labor and services aforesaid.”
POPULATION.
It is estimated that at the date of the passage of the Ordinance of 1787
the entire population of all the villages and settlements of the territory
in question did not exceed three thousand souls. These settlements were
chiefly made in the northwest and western portion of it. The French were
the occupants of the villages and environments, chief among which was
Detroit, on the Detroit river; St. Vincent, on the Wabash; Cahokia, a few
miles below St. Louis; St. Philip, forty-five miles below St. Louis, on the
Mississippi river; Kaskaskia, six miles above the mouth of the stream by
the same name; Prairie du Rocher, near Fort Chartres; and Fort Chartres,
fifteen miles northwest of Kaskaskia.
ORIGINAL SQUATTERS.
One who was well informed wrote of these people, m^ny years ago, as
follows: “Their intercourse with the Indians and their seclusion from
the world developed among them peculiar characteristics. They assimilated
themselves with the Indians, adopted their habits, and almost uniformly
lived in harmony with them. They were illiterate, careless, contented, but
without much industry, energy and forethought. Some were hunters, trap-
pers and anglers, while others run birch bark canoes by way of carrying on
a small internal trade, and still others cultivated the soil. The traders or
voyageurs were men fond of adventure, and of a wild, unrestrained Indian
sort of life, and would ascend many of the long rivers of the West, almost to
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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their sources, in their little birch-bark canoes and load them with furs bought
from the Indians. The canoes were light and could be easily carried across
the portages between the streams.,,
There was attached to these French villages a “common field” for the
free use of the villagers, every family, in proportion to the number of its mem-
bers, being entitled to a share of it. It was a large, enclosed tract for flairm-
ing purposes. There was also at each village a “common,” or large enclosed
tract, for pasturage and feed purposes, and timber for building.
CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE.
The Western Annals had this to say concerning the inhabitants of this
territory: “They were devout Catholics, who, under the guidance of their
priests, attended punctually upon the holidays and festivals and performed
faithfully all the outward duties and ceremonies of the church. Aside from
this, their religion was blended with their social feelings. Sundays, after
mass, was their special occasion for their games and assemblies. The
dance was the popular amusement with them, and all classes, ages, sexes and
conditions, united by a common love of enjoyment, met together to partici-
pate in the exciting pleasure. They were indifferent about the acquisition of
property for themselves or their children. Living in a fruitful country,
which, moreover, abounded in fish and game, and where the necessaries of
life could be procured with little labor, they were content to live in unambi-
tious peace and comfortable poverty. Their agriculture was rude, their
houses were humble, and they cultivated grain, also fruits and flowers; but
they lived on, from generation to generation, without much change or im-
provement. In some instances they married and intermarried with sur-
rounding Indiana tribes.”
These remote villages and settlements were usually protected by mili-
tary posts — Detroit especially, which in 1763, when held by the English,
had resisted the assaults of the great Pontiac — and had witnessed the wrin-
kled front of grim-visaged war a century before the adoption of the Ordi-
nance of 1787.
ORGANIZATION OF THE OHIO LAND COMPANY.
The best description of this great company is found in the secretary of
state’s reports of 1876, and is from the pen of that most accurate writer and
gatherer of statistics, Hon. Isaac Smfucker, of Licking county :
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
While Congress had under consideration the measure for the organiza-
tion of a territorial government northwest of the Ohio river, the preliminary
steps were taken in Massachusetts toward the formation of the Ohio Land
Company, for the purpose of making a purchase of a large tract of land in
said territory and settling upon it. Upon the passage of the ordinance by
Congress, the aforesaid land company perfected its organization and by its
agents, Rev. Manasseh Cutler and Maj. Winthrop Sargent, made applica-
tion to the board of treasury July 27, 1787, to become purchasers, said board
having been authorized four days before to make sales. The purchase,
which was perfected October 27, 1787, embraced a tract of land containing
about a million and a half acres situated within the counties (as now known)
of Washington, Athens, Meigs and Gallia, subject to the reservation of two
townships of land six miles square, for the endowment of a college, since
known as the Ohio University, at Athens; also every sixteenth section, set
apart for the use of schools, as well as every twenty-ninth section, dedicated
to the support of religious institutions; also sections 8, 11 and 26, which
were reserved by the United States for future sale. After these deductions
were made, and that for donation lands, there remained only nine hundred
and sixty-four thousand acres to be paid for by the Ohio Land Company,
and for which patents were issued.
At a meeting of the directors of the company, held in November, 1787,
Gen. Rufus Putnam was chosen superintendent of the company, and he ac-
cepted the position. Early in December six boat builders and a number of
other mechanics were sent forward to SimraH’s Ferry (now West Newton),
on the Youghiogheny river, under the command of Maj. Haffield White,
where they arrived in January, and at once proceeded to build a boat for the
use of the company. Col. Ebenezer Sproat, of Rhode Island, Anselm Tupper
and John Matthews, of Massachusetts, and Col. Return J. Meigs, of Con-
necticut, were appointed surveyors. Preliminary steps were also taken at
this meeting to secure a teacher and chaplain, which resulted in the appoint-
ment of Rev. Daniel Story, who sometime during the next year arrived at
the mouth of the Muskingum in the capacity of the first missionary and
teacher from New England.
Early in the winter the remainder of the pioneers, with the surveyors,
left their New England homes and started on their toilsome journey to the
western wilderness. They passed on over the Alleghany mountains, and
reached the Youghiogheny about the middle of February, where they rejoined
their companions who had preceded them.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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The boat, called the “Mayflower,” that was to transport the pioneers
to their destination, was forty-five feet long, twelve feet wide and fifty tons
burden, and was placed under the command of Captain Devol. Her bows
were raking, or curved like a galley, and strongly timbered; her sides were
made bullet proof, and she was covered with a deck roof, so as to afford
better protection against the hostile savages while floating down towards their
western home, and during its occupancy there before the completion of their
cabins. All things being ready, they embarked at Simrall’s Ferry, April 2,
1788, and passed down the Youghiogheny into the Monongahela, and thence
into the Ohio, and down said river to the mouth of the Muskingum, where
they arrived April 7th, and then and there made the first permanent settle-
ment of civilized men within the present limits of Ohio.
Many of the Yankee colonists had been officers and soldiers in the Rev-
olutionary war, and were, for the most part, men of intelligence and char-
acter and of sound judgment and much ability. In short, they were just
the kind of men to found a state in the wilderness. They possessed great
energy of character, were enterprising, fond of adventure and daring and
were not to be intimidated by the formidable forests, nor by the ferocious
beasts sheltered therein, nor by the still more to be dreaded savages, who
stealthily and with murderous intent roamed throughout their length and
breadth. Their army experiences had taught them what hardships and pri-
vations were, and they were quite willing to encounter them. A better set
of men could not have been selected for pioneer settlers than were these New
England colonists — those brave-hearted, courageous hero-emigrants to the
great northwest, who, having triumphantly passed the fiery ordeal of the
Revolution, volunteered to found a state and to establish American laws,
American institutions and American civilization in the wilderness of the
uncivilized West.
FIRST SETTLEMENT UNDER THE ORDINANCE OF 1 787.
Of course, no time was lost by the colonists in erecting their habita-
tions, as wrell as in building a stockade fort and in clearing land for the pro-
duction of vegetables and grain for their subsistence, fifty acres of corn
having been planted the first year. Their settlement was established upon
the point of land between the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, just opposite and
across the Muskingum from Fort Harmer, built in 1786 and at this time
garrisoned by a small military force under command of Major Doughty.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
At a meeting held on the banks of the Muskingum, July 2, 1788, it was
voted that Marietta should be the name of their town, it being thus named
in honor of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France.
SURVEYS AND PUBLIC LAND GRANTS.
The first survey of the public lands northwest of the Ohio river was
the seven ranges of congressional lands, and was executed pursuant to an
act of Congress of May 20, 1785. This tract of “the seven ranges” is
bounded by a line of forty-two miles in length, running due west from the
point where the western boundary line of Pennsylvania crosses the Ohio
river; thence due south to the Ohio river, at the southeast comer of Marietta
township, in Washington county; thence up the said river to the place of
beginning. The present counties of Jefferson, Columbiana, Carroll, Tus-
carawas, Harrison, Guernsey, Belmont, Noble, Monroe and Washington are,
in whole or in part, within the seven ranges.
The second survey was that of the Ohio Company’s purchase, made
in pursuance of an act of Congress of July 23, 1785, though the contract
was not completed with the Ohio Company until October 27, 1787. One
hundred thousand acres of this tract, called donation lands, were received
on conditions as a free gift to actual settlers. Portions of the counties of
Washington, Athens and Gallia are within this tract, also the entire county
of Meigs. The donation lands were in Washington county.
The next survey was the Symmes Purchase and contiguous lands, situ-
ated to the north and west of it, and was made soon after the foregoing.
The Symmes Purchase embraced the entire Ohio river front between the
Big Miami and Little Miami rivers, a distance of twenty-seven miles, and
reaching northward a sufficient distance to include an area of one million
acres. The contract with Judge Symmes, made in October, 1787, was later
modified by act of Congress bearing date of May 5, 1792, and by an author-
ized act of the President of the United States, of September 30, 1794, so
as to amount to only three hundred eleven thousand six hundred eighty-two
acres, exclusive of a reservation of fifteen acres around Fort Washington, of
a square mile at the mouth of the Great Miami, of sections 16 and 29 in each
township, the former of which Congress had reserved for educational pur-
poses and religious affairs ; exclusive also of a township dedicated to the in-
terests of a college ; and sections 8, 1 1 and 26, which Congress reserved for
future sale.
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The tract of land situated between the Little Miami and Scioto rivers,
known as the Virginia military lands, was never regularly surveyed into
townships, but patents were issued by the President of the United States
to such persons (Virginians) as had rendered service on the continental
establishment in the army of the United States (hence the name), and in
the quantities to which they were entitled, according to the previous acts of
Congress of August 10, 1790. It embraces a body of six thousand five hun-
dred and seventy square miles, or four million two hundred and four thou-
sand eight hundred acres. The following counties are situated in the tract :
Adams, Brown, Clermont, Clinton, Fayette, Highland, Madison and Union
entirely, and greater or less portions of Marion, Delaware, Franklin, Pick-
away, Ross, Pike, Scioto, Warren, Greene, Clarke, Champaign, Logan and
Hardin.
Connecticut ceded all lands in the Northwest to which she claimed title
to the United States (except the tract which has been known as the West-
ern Reserve), by deed of cession bearing date September 14, 1786, and in
May, 1800, by the act of the Legislature of said state, renounced all juris-
diction and claim to the “territory of the Western Reserve of Connecticut.”
The tract of land was surveyed in 1796 and later into townships of five miles
square, and in the aggregate contained about three million eight hundred
thousand acres, being one hundred and twenty miles long and lying west of
the Pennsylvania state line, all situated between forty-one degrees and
forty-two degrees and two minutes of north latitude. Half a million of acres
of the foregoing lands were set apart by the state of Connecticut, in 1792,
as a donation to the sufferers by fire (during the Revolutionary war) of the
residents of Greenwich, New London, Norwalk, Fairfield, Danbury, New
Haven and other Connecticut villages whose property was burned by the
British; hence the name “firelands,” by which this tract taken from the
western portion of the Reserve has been known. It is situated chiefly in
Huron and Erie counties, a small portion only being in Ottawa county. The
entire Western Reserve embraces the present counties of Ashtabula, Cuya-
hoga, Erie, Geauga, Huron, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage and Trumbull;
also the greater portion of Mahoning and Summit and very limited portions
of Ashland and Ottawa.
THE FRENCH GRANT
is a tract of twenty-four thousand acres of land bordering on the Ohio
river within the present limits of Scioto county, granted by Congress in
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
March, 1795, to certain French settlers of Gallipolis who, through invalid
titles, had lost their lands there. Twelve hundred acres were added to this
grant in 1798, making a total of twenty-five thousand two hundred acres.
THE UNITED STATES MILITARY LANDS
were surveyed under the provisions of the act of Congress of June 1, 1796,
and contained two million five hundred and sixty thousand acres. This
tract was set apart to satisfy certain claims of the officers and soldiers of
the Revolutionary war, hence the title by which it is known. It is bounded
by the “seventh range” on the east, by the Greenville treaty line on the
north, by the congressional and refugee lands on the south, and by the Scioto
river on the west, including the county of Coshocton entire, and portions
of the counties of Tuscarawas, Guernsey, Muskingum, Licking, Franklin,
Delaware, Marion, Morrow, Knox and Holmes.
THE MORAVIAN LANDS
are three several tracts of four thousand acres each, situated respectively at
Shoenbrun, Gnadenhutten and Salem, all on the Tuscarawas river. These
lands were originally dedicated by an ordinance of Congress of June 1, 1796,
and were surveyed and patents issued to the Society of the United Brethren,
for the purpose above specified.
THE REFUGEE TRACT
is a body of land containing one hundred thousand acres, granted by Con-
gress February 18, 1801, to persons who fled from the British provinces
during the Revolutionary war and took up arms against the mother country
and in behalf of the colonies, and thereby lost their property by confiscation
This tract is four and one-half miles wide and extends forty-eight miles
eastward from the Scioto river, at Columbus, into Muskingum county. It
includes portions of the counties of Franklin. Fairfield, Perry, Licking and
Muskingum.
dohrman's grant
is a township of land six miles square, containing thirteen thousand acres,
situated in the southeastern part of Tuscarawas county. It was given to
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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Arnold Henry Dohrman, a Portuguese merchant of Lisbon, by act of Con*
gress of February 27, 1801, “in consideration of his having during the
Revolutionary war given shelter and aid to the American cruisers and vessels
of war.”
INDIAN TREATIES.
By the terms of the treaty of Fort Stanwix, concluded with the Iroquois
or Six Nations (Mohawks, Onondagas, Senecas, Cayugas, Tuscaroras and
Oneidas) October 23, 1784, the indefinite claim of said confederacy to the
greater part of the valley of the Ohio was extinguished. The commissioners
of Congress were Oliver Wolcott, Richard Butler and Arthur Lee. Corn-
planter and Red Jacket represented the Indians.
This was followed in January, 1785, by the treaty of Fort McIntosh,
bv which the Delawares. Wyandots, Ottawas and Chippewas relinquished
all claim to the Ohio valley and established the boundary line between them
and the United States to be the Cuyahoga river, and along the main branch
of the Tuscarawas to the forks of said river, near Fort Laurens, thence
vvestwardly to the portage between the headwaters of the Great Miami and
the Maumee or Maumee of the lakes, thence down said river to Lake Erie,
and along said lake to the mouth of the Cuyahoga river. This treaty was
negotiated by George Rogers Clark, Richard Butler and Arthur Lee, for the
United States, and by the chiefs of the aforesaid tribes.
A similar relinquishment was effected by the treaty of Fort Finney (at
the mouth of the Great Miami), concluded with the Shawnees January 31,
1786, the United States commissioners being the same as the foregoing, ex-
cept the substitution of Samuel H. Parsons for Arthur Lee.
THE TREATY OF FORT HARMAR,
held by General St. Clair January 9, 1789, was mainly confirmatory of the
treaties previously made. So was also the treaty of Greenville, of August
3, 1705, made by General Wayne, on the part of the United States, and the
chiefs of eleven of the most powerful tribes of the northwestern Indians,
which re-established the Indian boundary line through the present state
of Ohio and extended it from Loramie to Fort Recovery, and from thence
to the Ohio river, opposite the mouth of the Kentucky river.
The rights and titles acquired by the Indian tribes under the foregoing
treaties were extinguished by the general government by purchase or subse-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
quent treaties. The Western Reserve tract west of the Cuyahoga river was
secured by a treaty formed at Fort Industry, in 1805. The lands west of
Richland and Huron counties and north of the boundary line to the western
limits of Ohio were purchased in 1818. The last possession of the Dela-
wares was purchased in 1829, and by a treaty made at Upper Sandusky,
March 17, 1842, by Col. John Johnston and the Wyandot chiefs, the last
remnant of the Indian tribes in Ohio sold the last acre of land they owned
within the limits of the state to the general government, and retired the
next year to the far West, settling at and near the mouth of the Kansas
river.
FIRST TERRITORIAL OFFICERS.
In the month of October, 1787, Congress appointed Gen. Arthur St.
Clair, governor; Maj. Winthrop Sargent, secretary, and James M. Varnum,
Samuel H. Parsons and John Armstrong, judges of the territory; the latter,
however, declining, John Cleves was appointed in his place. July 9, 1788,
Governor St. Clair arrived at Marietta and, finding the secretary and a
majority of the judges present, proceeded to organize the territory. The
Governor and judges were the sole legislative power during the existence
of the first grade of territorial government. Such laws were in force as
were in other states, and were such as applied to the people of the territory.
THE SECOND TERRITORIAL GOVERNMENT.
The Ordinance of 1787 provided that after it should be ascertained that
five thousand free male inhabitants actually resided within the territory
the second grade of government could, of right, be established, which pro-
vided for a legislative council, and also an elective house of representatives,
the two composing the law-making power of the territory, provided always
that the governor’s assent to their acts was had. He possessed the abso-
lute veto power in each branch, and nothing could become a law without his
sanction. The conditions that authorized the second grade of territorial
government, however, did not exist until 1798, and it was not really put
into operation until September, 1799, after the first grade of government
had been in operation eleven years.
EARLY TERRITORIAL LAWS.
The first law was proclaimed July 25, 1788, and was entitled “An Act
for Regulating and Establishing the Militia.” Two days thereafter the
Governor issued a proclamation establishing the county of Washington,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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which included all the territory east of the Scioto river to which the Indian
title had been extinguished, reaching northward to Lake Erie, the Ohio
river and the Pennsylvania line being its eastern boundary; Marietta, the
seat of the territorial government, also became the county seat of Washing-
ton county.
Quite a number of laws were necessarily adopted and published during
1788 and the following year. From 1790 to 1795 they published sixty-four,
forty-four of them being adopted at Cincinnati during the months of June,
July and August of the year last named, by the Governor and Judges
Symmes and Turner. They are known as the “Maxwell Code,” from the
name of the publisher, and were intended, says the author of Western An-
nals, “to form a pretty complete body of statutory provisions.” In 1798
eleven more were adopted. It was the published opinion of Chief Justice
Chase “that it may be doubted whether any colony, at so early a period after
its first establishment, ever had so good a code of laws.” Among them
was that which provided that the common law of England, and all statutes
in aid thereof made previous to the fourth year of James I, should be in
full force within the territory. Probably four-fifths of the laws adopted were
selected from those in force in Pennsylvania, and others were mainly taken
from the statutes of Virginia and Massachusetts.
ORGANIZATION OF EARLY COUNTIES.
Washington county, embracing the eastern half of the present state
of Ohio, was the only organized county of the Northwest Territory until
early in 1790, when the Governor proclaimed Hamilton county, which em-
braced all the territory between the Big and Little Miami rivers, and ex-
tended north to the “Standing Stone Forks,” on the first-named stream.
Undoubtedly Wayne county was the third in order of organization. The
Ordinance of 1787, referring to the territory “Northwest of the River Ohio,”
divided it into three divisions, the “Western,” the “Middle” and the “Eastern.”
Howe, in his “History of Ohio,” says: “Wayne county was established by
proclamation of Governor St. Clair, August 15, 1796, and was the third
county formed in the Northwest Territory. Its original limits were very ex-
tensive, and were thus defined in the act creating it : 'Beginning at the mouth
of the Cuyahoga river, upon Lake Erie, and with said river to the portage,
between it and the Tuscarawas branch of the Muskingum; thence down the
said branch to the forks at the carrying place above Fort Laurens; thence by
a west line to the east boundary of Hamilton county (which is a due north
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
line from the lower Shawnees town upon the Scioto river) ; thence by a line
west northerly to the southern part of the portage between the Miamis of
the Ohio and the St. Mary’s river ; thence by a line also west northerly to the
southwestern part of the portage between the Wabash and the Miamis of
Lake Erie, where Fort Wayne now stands; thence by a line west northerly
to the southern part of Lake Michigan ; thence along the western shores of the
same to the northwest part thereof (including the lands upon the streams
emptying into the said lake) ; thence by a due north line to the territorial
boundary in Lake Superior, and with the said boundary through Lakes Huron,
Sinclair and Erie to the mouth of Cuyahoga river, the place of beginning.'
“These limits embrace what is now a part of Ohio. Indiana, Illinois, Wis-
consin and all of Michigan, and the towns of Ohio City, Chicago, Sault St.
Mary’s, Mackinaw, etc.” The same is given in the “Hundred Year Book/’
issued by the state of Ohio in 1902.
It will be observed that Hamilton was the second county organized
in Ohio. There were situated within its limits, when organized, several
flourishing villages that had their origin during the closing months of 1788
and early in 1789.
Cincinnati was laid out in 1789, by Col. Robert Patterson, Mathias
Denman and Israel Ludlow. Several not very successful attempts had also
been made at various points between Cincinnati and the mouth of the
Great Miami by Judge Symmes. The early settlers in Hamilton county were
mostly from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky. The
Scioto valley was next to be settled, and chiefly by persons from Virginia
and Kentucky.
The early settlement along the shore of Lake Erie, during the closing
years of the eighteenth century, had such representative men as Governor
Samuel Huntington and Hon. Benjamin Tappan, and the good words that
General Washington said of the New Englanders who settled at Marietta
could with a slight modification apply to the pioneers of the aforesaid set-
tlement.
EARLY OHIO VILLAGES AND TOWNS.
The following is a list of the principal villages and towns of the North-
west Territory, started and built up during territorial rule, with the time of
surveying the first lots, also names of the proprietors :
Marietta, laid out in 1788 b\ Rufus Putnam and the Ohio Land Com-
pany.
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Columbia, laid out in 1788 by Benjamin Stites, Major Gano and others.
Cincinnati, laid out in 1789 by Robert Patterson, Mathias Denman and
Israel Ludlow.
Gallipolis, laid out in 1791 by the French settlers.
Manchester, laid out in 1791 by Nathaniel Massie.
Hamilton, laid out in 1794 by Israel Ludlow.
Dayton, laid out in 1795 by Israel Ludlow and Generals Dayton and
Wilkinson.
Franklin, laid out in 1795 by William C. Schenck and Daniel C. Cooper.
Chillicothe, laid out in 1796 by Nathaniel Massie.
Cleveland, laid out in 1796 by Job V. Styles.
Franklinton, laid out in 1797 by Lucas Sullivant.
Steubenville, laid out in 1798 by Bazaleel Wells and Jamies Ross.
Williamsburg, laid out in 1799.
Zanesville, laid out in 1799 by Jonathan Zane and John Mclntire.
New Lancaster, laid out in 1800 by Ebenezer Zane.
Warren, laid out in 1801 by Ephraim Quinby.
St. Clairsville, laid out in 1801 by David Newell.
Springfield, laid out in 1801 by James Demint.
Newark, laid out in 1802 by William C. Schenck. G. W. Burnett and
John N. Cummings.
At the time the territorial government ended in Ohio, Cincinnati was
the largest town within the territory and contained about one thousand
population. It was incorporated in 1802.
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CHAPTER II.
INDIAN TRIBES AND MILITARY CAMPAIGNS.
From the time of the organization of the government of the North-
west Territory, in 1788, until the ratification of the treaty of Greenville,
in 1795, the attitude of many of the Indian tribes towards the white settlers
was that of extreme and unrelenting hostility. The military organizations
which had marched against them, before the establishment of civil govern-
ment in the great Northwest, had signally failed to subjugate them or secure
a permanent cessation of hostilities. The disastrous expedition of General
Braddock in 1755, °f Major Wilkins in 1763, of Colonel Bradstreet in 1764,
of Colonel Lochry in 1781 and of Colonel Crawford in 1782, and the dis-
graceful and murderous expedition against the Moravian Indians on the
Tuscarawas, the last named year, only tended to inflame the hostile Indians
and inspire them with greater courage in their hostile movements and
aggressive measures against the white settlers. The fruitless, if not abortive,
campaigns of Colonel McDonald in 1774, of General McIntosh in 1778 and
of General Broadhead in 1781, of course led to no salutary results. Even
the successful campaigns of Colonel Boquet in 1763-4, of Lord Dunmore
and General Lewis in 1774, and of George Rogers Clark in 1788, failed to
secure peace with the western tribes. The inhabitants of the Northwest
Territory were therefore, from the 7th of April, 1788, when the first immi-
grants arrived at the mouth of the Muskingum, until the treaty of Green-
ville was concluded in August, 1795, constantly liable to the stealthy but
deadly attacks of the perfidious, merciless savages of the Northwest.’ But
they met their deadly, cruel, relentless foes in the spirit of genuine manhood
— of true, determined, unflinching heroism. They were men worthy of
the heroic age of the West. Bravely did they bear themselves during those
seven years of toil and privations, of dread and apprehension, of suffering
and sorrow, of blood and carnage.
To secure the speedy termination of these savage atrocities the national
government early organized a number of military expeditions, the first of
which being that of General Harmar. in 1790, who was then commander-
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33
in-chief of the military department of the West. He had a few hundred reg-
ular troops under his command, stationed chiefly at Fort Harmar and Fort
Washington, which served as the nucleus of his army. The great body of
his troops, however, numbering about fourteen hundred, were Pennsylvania
and Kentucky volunteers, the former being under the immediate command
of Col. John Hardin and the latter of Colonel Trotter. The expedition left
Fort Washington and marched to the junction of the St. Joseph and St.
Mary rivers (now Fort Wayne, Indiana), where detachments of the army,
under command of Colonel Hardin, on the 19th and 22d of October, en-
countered the enemy and suffered mortifying defeats. Of course, the cam-
paign failed to give peace or relief from apprehended barbarities.
The next year General St. Clair, the Governor of the territory, who
had had a Revolutionary record of patriotism and ability, organized an
sole purpose of this military movement was to destroy the common enemies
expedition, whose strength exceeded somewhat that of General Harmar’s.
It met with a most disastrous defeat, November 4, 1791, near the head-
waters of the Wabash, now in Mercer county, Ohio, the battlefield now
being known as Fort Recovery. Of fifteen hundred men in the battle, more
than half of them were either killed or wounded, and it was indeed a great
calamity to the disheartened and greatly harassed pioneers of the North-
west Territory.
Immediately upon the defeat of General St. Clair, the federal gov-
ernment took the preliminary steps to raise a large army to operate against
the hostile tribes for the purpose of finally and permanently subjugating
them. Military preparations, however, progressed slowly, and the summer
of 1794 had nearly passed before the confederated hostile Indians were met
in battle array by General Wayne’s army. The battle was fought at the
Maumee rapids at Fort Meigs, in Wood county, Ohio. The same is known
as the battle of Falling Timbers, though sometimes called battle of the
Maumee. Wayne’s army numbered about three thousand men, well disci-
plined and ably officered, sixteen hundred of whom were mounted volun-
teer troops from Kentucky, commanded by Gen. Charles Scott, of said state,
who was the second ranking officer of the army. The choice, however, fell
upon Gen. Anthony Wayne, the old comrade-in-arms of the President, and
to him is justly ascribed the honor of defeating the Indians commanded by
the celebrated chief, Blue Jacket, on the Maumee, August 20, 1794, and of
permanently breaking the power of a very formidable Indian confederacy.
Cessation of hostilities followed the victory and a peace was secured which
(3)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
the general government had vainly sought by friendly negotiations — a peace
that continued for many years, even until after the Northwest Territory
had ceased to be and the important incidents and events connected there-
with had passed into history.
SECOND GRADE OF TERRITORIAL GOVERNMENT.
The Territory of the Northwest having reached a position where it
contained five thousand free male inhabitants, on the 29th of October, 1798,
preliminary steps were taken to cause it to take on its second grade in
governmental affairs, by proclaiming a call for an election of territorial rep-
resentatives, the same to be held the third Monday in December, 1798. The
representatives from Wayne county were Solomon Sibley, Jacob Visgar and
Charles F. Chabert. These, with nineteen other representatives, met at
Cincinnati January 22, 1799, and nominated ten men, whose names they for-
warded to the United States Congress, five of whom were to be selected by
that body to constitute the Legislative Council of the territory. They then
adjourned, to meet September 16, *799.
March 22, 1799, either Congress or the President (it is not known
which) chose from among the names already mentioned, including those
from Wayne county, the following gentlemen to compose the first Legislative
Council of the Northwest Territory, their term of office to continue for five
years, any three of whom to form a quorum: Jacob Burnet, of Cincinnati,
Hamilton county; Henry Vanderburg, of Vincennes, Knox county; Robert
Oliver, of Marietta, Washington county; James Findley, of Cincinnati,
Hamilton county; David Vance, of Vanceville, Jefferson county.
The Ordinance of 1787 named Congress as the authority in whom was
vested the right to select five from the list of ten persons to constitute the
Territorial Council. But it will be borne in mind that said ordinance was
passed by a Congress that legislated in pursuance of the articles of confedera-
tion, while yet we had neither President nor United States senators, hence
authority was given to Congress to make a selection. But it is highly prob-
able that the aforesaid authority was later transferred to the President, or
to the senate, or to them jointly.
FIRST COUNCIL AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.
Both the Council and the House of Representatives met at Cincinnati;
September 16, 1799, and effected a permanent organization. The president
of the Council was Henry Vanderburg: the secretary was William C.
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35
Schneck ; doorkeeper, George. Howars, and sergeant-at-arms, Abraham Cary.
The officers of the first House of Representatives were: Speaker of the
House, Edwin Tiffin; clerk, John Riley; doorkeeper, Joshua Rowland;
sergeant-at-arms, Abraham Cary.
Thirty bills were passed at the first session of the Territorial Legisla-
ture, but the Governor vetoed eleven of them. They also elected William
Henry Harrison, then secretary of the territory, a delegate to Congress, by
a vote of eleven to ten that were cast for Arthur St. Clair, Jr., a son of
General and Governor St. Clair. The first session of the Territorial Legis-
lature was prolonged until November, 1800, at which time they reassembled
at Chillicothe, which place had been made the seat of the territorial govern-
ment. The second session only lasted about one month.
On May 9, 1800, Congress passed an act establishing Indiana Territory,
with boundary including the present states of Indiana and Illinois, and Wil-
liam Henry Harrison having accepted the office of governor of that terri-
tory, it devolved upon the Territorial Legislature, at its second session, not
only to elect a delegate to fill the vacancy occasioned by his resignation, but
also to elect a delegate to serve during the succeeding Congress. William
McMillan, of Cincinnati, was elected to fill the vacancy, and Paul Fearing,
of Marietta, was elected to serve from March 4, 1801, to March 4, 1803.
They were both reputed to be men of superior ability.
By the organization of Indiana Territory, the counties of St. Clair,
Knox and Randolph were taken out of the jurisdiction of the Northwest
Territory, and with them, of course, Henry Vanderburg, of Knox county,
president of the Council; also Shadrack Bond, of St. Clair county; John
Small, of Knox county, and John Edgar, of Randolph county, members of
the popular Legislature.
November 23, 1801, the third session of the Territorial Legislature was
commenced at Chillicothe, pursuant to adjournment. The time for which
the members of the House of Representatives were elected having expired,
and an election having been held, quite a number of new members appeared.
The Council remained nearly as it was at the previous session, there being
but two changes, that of Solompn Sibley, of Detroit, Wayne county, who
took the place of Henry Vanderburg, thrown into the new territory; Robert
Oliver, of Marietta, was chosen president of the Council.
Wayne county, as then constituted, was represented in the third session
by Francois Joncaire Chabert, George McDonald and Jonathan Schieffelin.
This was the last session of the Territorial Legislature of the Northwest
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Territory, with Ohio as a part, because Congress, on April 30, 1802, passed
an act “to enable the people of the eastern division of the territory north-
west of the Ohio river to form a constitution and state government, and
for the admission of such state into the Union on an equal footing with
the original states, and for other purposes.” Members of the constitutional
convention for Ohio met at Chillicothe, November 1, 1802, to perform the
duty assigned them.
The territorial government was ended by the organization of the state
government, March 3, 1803, when the history of the state of Ohio com-
menced in fact.
MILITARY CAMPAIGNS IN WAYNE COUNTY.
In the late Ben Douglas’s history of Wayne county, issued in 1878,
the description of the various campaigns of a military nature that have
taken place on and near Wayne county soil has been so fairly and correctly
treated from a true historical standpoint that it has been thought wise to
incorporate much of the chapter in this work, as Mr. Douglas was selected
as one of the writers, furnished some of the material for this work and
died before the work was completed.
Crawford’s expedition was under direction of the United States gov-
ernment, and not under the black flag, as has sometimes been stated. The
of the frontier, but not, as has sometimes been supposed, to destroy the
Indian tribes who were innocent of any crime. Mr. Butterfield, in his
"Crawford’s Campaign Against Sandusky,” cleared up many of the hitherto
mysteries touching this much-talked-of campaign.
As a matter of history, startling and interesting to us all, and to expel
uncertainty concerning the occupancy of Wayne county by soldiery prior
to and during the early settlement of it, this brief chapter is introduced.
It will be necessary to summarize, as this section was not the theater of any
signal exploits, but simply on the line of transit to the subsequent tragic
field. Researches along this line were instigated in a measure by the fact
that in the minds of many people they have been associated with the war of
1812. In this search for material there have been frequently pointed out a
score of exact spots where Crawford encamped, the precise place where
he crossed Killbuck, the Indian trail that he followed, or the road that he
had cut through the woods, etc. All of which opinions are honestly enter-
tained, but altogether incorrect. Heckwelder, Doddridge and dozens of
others have denounced and defamed the organization as bandits, a troop of
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37
murderers, intent on slaughtering the rest of the Christian Indians, and
repeating the massacre of Gnadenhutten, with which the brave Williamson
was identified. To place Crawford and the purpose of his campaign fairly
before the public, it is only necessary to allude to the instructions of Gen.
William Irvine, commander of the western department, located at Fort Pitt,
addressed to the officer that might be appointed to command the expedition
against the Indian town, or in proximity to Sandusky:
“The object of your command is to destroy with fire and sword (if prac-
ticable) the Indian town and settlement at Sandusky, by which we hope to
give ease and safety to the inhabitants of this country; but if impracticable,
then you will doubtless perform such other services in your power as will,
in their consequences, have a tendency to answer this great end. * * *
“And it is indispensably necessary that subordination and discipline
should be kept. The whole ought to understand that, notwithstanding they
are volunteers, yet by this tour they are to get credit for it in their tours of
military duties; and that for this and other good reasons they must, while
out on this duty, consider themselves to all intents subject to military laws
and regulations for the government of the militia when in active service.
You must always have in view laws of arms, of nations, or independent
states.”
The volunteers constituting the force, numbering about four hundred
and eighty men, were principally Pennsylvanians, in the vigor and bloom of
their active life. Butterfield asserts that two-thirds of them were from Wash-
ington county, Pennsylvania. In a manuscript letter, written November io,
1799, General Irvine says: “The troops were volunteer militia, part Penn-
sylvanians and part Virginians, and a few continental officers whom I sent.”
By the 25th of May, 1782, the river had been crossed and the men mus-
tered at the old Mingo towns west of the Ohio. Immediately an election
was had for officers, William Crawford being chosen colonel, by five of a ma-
jority, over David Williamson, his competitor, who had many persistent
friends.
The dauntless commander of the ill-starred expedition was of Scotch-
Irish parentage, but a native of Orange county, Virginia, where he was born
in 1732. He was a companion and associate of Washington, with whom he
had acquired a knowledge of land surveying. He was commissioned an
ensign when twenty-three years old, in 1755, by the governor of Virginia.
Subsequently he served under General Forbes, and in January, 1776, as a
lieutenant-colonel, he joined the Revolutionary army. He crossed the Dela-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
ware with Washington Christmas day and rejoiced with him in Trenton over
victory the following day. He was retired in October, 1781.
But soon a scheme was discussed, in view of the threatening aspect of
the border and Indian troubles, especially the tribes in the vicinity of San-
dusky. Against his fixed determination to remain in private life were ar-
rayed the public exigency, his powerful impulse of patriotism, and the warm
friendship he had for General Irvine. With severe reluctance he accepted
the command to which he had been elected May 24, 1782. So it was that
the sunlight of the following morning found William Crawford, then fifty
years of age, at the head of an army of four columns marching from Mingo
Bottom for Sandusky, its objective point, a distance of one hundred and fifty
miles. Here the description of Mr. Butterfield concerning the movement of
this campaign will be given in his own language, as follows:
“The route lay through what is now the counties of Jefferson, Harrison,
Tuscarawas, Holmes, Ashland, Richland and Crawford, nearly to the center
of Wyandot county, Ohio. A direct course would have led near the present
towns of New Philadelphia, Millersburg, Loudonville and Gabon, but, as
will hereafter be seen, this straight line was not followed. The whole dis-
tance, except about thirty miles at the end of the route, was through an
unbroken forest.
“The principal impediments to a rapid march were the hills, swamps and
tangled growth of forests. The Muskingum, Killbuck, forks of the Mohican
and Sandusky were the streams to be crossed, all of which, at this season of
the year, and especially in the spring of 1782, were not fordable without
difficulty. As the cavalcade moved up over the bluff, an almost due west
course was taken, striking at once into the wilderness, now deepening and
darkening around it. The army progressed rapidly at first, moving along the
north side of Cross creek, which had already received the name it still
bears. After leaving what is now Steubenville township, it passed through
the present township of Crosscreek, and Wayne, to the western boundary of
Jefferson county, as at present defined, crossing into what is now Harrison
county, in German township: thence across the summit to the spot where
the town of Jefferson now stands. From this point a straight course would
have led them, at no great distance, into what is now Carroll county. But
their horses had tired under their heavy loads in the hills and swamps.
This obliged them to incline to the southward, toward the wasted Moravian
towns, into a more level country, though more frequented by hunters and
warriors. This alternative was accepted by Crawford with great reluctance,
as his policy was to avoid trails and the region infested bv the enemy.
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39
relying for success, as already stated, upon effecting a surprise. Otherwise
he would have followed Williamson’s trail from Mingo Bottom to the Mus-
kingum, which led along a considerable distance south, near where Smiths-
field, in Jefferson, and Cadiz, in Harrison counties, now stand, through a
region not so difficult to be traversed, but on the line of the Indian traces
between the Ohio and Muskingum rivers.”
From the moment of starting, every precaution was taken against sur-
prises, or ambuscades, and this too although, as yet, not an Indian had been
seen. The wily nature of the savage was too well understood by the com-
mander of the expedition to allow of any confidence of security because no
foe had been discovered. Nothing worthy of note transpired until Monday
night, the 27th, while at their third encampment. Here a few of the men lost
their horses, and as their continuing with the army, unable as they were to
carry little besides their arms, would only prove a source of embarrass-
ment, they reluctantly, therefore, retraced their steps to Mingo Bottom.
Sixty miles had been made in four days’ march, when the fourth en-
campment was made upon the charred remains of New Schonbrunn. “Dur-
ing the evening,” continues the same author, “Major Brinton and Captain
Bean went some distance from camp to reconnoiter. When but a quarter
of a mile away they espied two savages, upon whom they immediately fired,
but without effect. These were the first hostile shots fired at the foe. It
was supposed by Crawford that the army had not before been discovered by
the enemy. Fallacious belief! Secrecy now being out of the question, as
the two Indians had made their escape, it only remained for Crawford to
press forward, with all possible dispatch, to afford the enemy as little time
as possible for defensive preparations. The march was therefore continued
on the morning of the 29th, rapidly, but with greater precaution than had
previously been observed. The guides, taking a northwest course through the
wilderness from the Muskingum, brought the army to the Killbuck, some
distance above the present town of Millersburg, the county seat of Holmes
county. Thence they marched to the Killbuck. At a short distance the army
reached a large spring, later known as Butler's or Jones’ spring, near the
line of Wayne county, ten miles south of Wooster, where, on the evening
of May 30th, the volunteers encamped. At this spring one of the men died
and was buried, his name being cut on the bark of a tree close by his grave.
“From this point the army moved westward along the north side of what
is known as Odell's lake, passing between two small lakes, where they found
the heads of two large fish, freshly caught, lying on the ground, which
awakened suspicion that Indians were near. Thence they passed the spot
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
where afterward was founded the village of Greentown, in Ashland county,
as now known. From this point they struck across to the Rocky Fork of
the Mohican, up which stream they traveled until a spring was reached, near
where the city of Mansfield now stands, in Richland county ; thence a little
north of west, to a fine spring five miles farther up in what is known as
Spring Mills, on the line of the present Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago
railroad, eight miles east of the town of Crestline, in Crawford county. The
army halted and pitched camp there for the night.
“It forcibly pressed forward into what is now Crawford county, to a
point on the Sandusky river a short distance west of Crestline, where a brief
halt was made and enjoyed. Although on the enemy's threshold, being then
but twenty-five miles from the contemplated point, there was not visible the
face of a solitary red devil. Their march was vigorously conducted, leaving
Bucyrus about three miles to the north, when a rest was made near the
present village of Wyandot. After extraordinary caution and the most cir-
cumspect care, on the morning of the 4th of June the expedition — then but
ten miles from its destination — opened march. This was executed with
considerable celerity, and the Wyandot town was soon in possession of
Crawford and his men. But the artful and wary Copper Cheeks were not
there ! The cunning of the wily savages was demonstrated and the surprise
strategy forestalled and outwitted !
“The abandoned Indian village was occupied but a few brief hours by
the somewhat disappointed but indomitable commandant and his troops. He
resolved upon pursuit, which was commenced. But before much progress
in this respect had been made, and for prudential and grave reasons, he
checked his advance and convened his subordinates for purposes of con-
sultation. The substance of their deliberations was to not much longer
continue in the pursuit, as the absence of the Indian force on the plain lands
induced the sober conjecture that they were concentrating their hordes for
bloody and stubborn opposition. For such is the antithesis of the Indian
character, such its fecundity of plot and design, such its fertility in original
conception, that to circumvent it is no easy task — and with this vast central
fact was Crawford familiar. As a consequence a body of light horse was
utilized as scouts. Their reconnoiterings soon developed the locality and
position of the tawny warriors, of which fact Crawford was immediately ap-
prized. The advance of the savages was slow but determined. Crawford
prepared for battle and ordered a forward movement. Sharp volleys from
his ranks soon caused them to withdraw from a grove which they had
selected, a most favorable position. Captain Pipe, or The Pipe, commanded
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41
the Delawares, the van of the assailants, and with him were Girty and Win-
genttnd. Soon the Delawares were reinforced by the Wyandots, the whole
force being under the command of the infamous Elliott, a white demon,
who ordered a flank movement, which for a while tasted mightily like dis-
aster to the brave boys who mustered on Mingo Bottom. But the American
position, in spite of the craft of the enemy, was valorously maintained. From
four o’clock, when the gauntlet of the battle was accepted, until the shadows
of the night were descending the conflict was carried on, and very frequently
with ambiguous success to our arms. However, as night approached, the
firing perceptibly diminished and by daybreak it had substantially subsided.
“The victory was clearly with the Americans, and although Crawford
was left in full possession of the battlefield, yet the Indians were far from
being dispirited. They well knew that reinforcements were hastening to
their relief — that these would certainly reach them on the morrow.
“The next day, June 5th, irregular and random interchanges of mus-
ketry were indulged in without serious ‘hurt or inconvenience’ to either side.
Meanwhile plans had been consummated for a desperate and decisive assault.
“‘Alas! how hope is born to expire.’
“This project was dashed in its inception, crushed in embryo. Mounted
Assyrians from a British camp made their appearance in the interests of
the barbaric wretches whom they were inciting to cruelty and revenge. Here
was an element of resistance on which Crawford had not calculated, and
which had not excited the remotest suspicion. That night a council of war
resolved that prudence dictated retreat, and when orders were issued to that
effect, the same took place at 9 P. M. Suspecting a retreat and general back-
ward movement, the Indians began a sharp fire, which produced some tem-
porary confusion and consternation, but which was unaccompanied with any
stirring results. This was but a slight impediment to the retreat, as it was
soon undertaken, with Crawford in the front. The Delawares and Shawnees
interposed prompt and stout resistance. Flank and rear of the army were
sorely harassed. A portion of it had become considerably demoralized. For
the first time it was now discovered that Colonel Crawford was missing, as
was also Doctor Knight, the surgeon of the command.
“David Williamson, on whom devolved the control of the force, dis-
played great activity and zeal in restoring order and dispelling confusion.
Nor was the jewel of good luck to be awarded him either, for, on the 6th of
the month, he was ‘brought up standing’ by his persistent pursuers. Yet
he delivered heroic battle, and although attacked on the front, left flank and
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
rear, his assailants soon inclined to withdraw. As the retreat continued, at
intervals the enemy would pour a destructive fire into our ranks, but through
the chivalrous efforts of Williamson and Lieutenant Rose any rout or stam-
pede was avoided.
“After the final shots were exchanged the boys who had escaped the
torment and the tormentors were permitted to return to the Ohio as best
they could through the wilderness, without any serious molestation or fear.”
Of this ill-turned military campaign it is useless to write further, than
to describe as best we can from the writing's of others the harrowing catas-
trophe which befell the bold and gallant leader, Crawford.
THE BURNING OF COLONEL CRAWFORD.
Col. William Crawford’s capture and cruel death by burning paints one
of the darkest pictures in the great Indian warfare of this country. His
capture resulted from the confusion incident to the retreat and the solicitude
he had for his son John, his son-in-law and nephew, from whom he had
become separated. He was ambuscaded by a gang of Delawares about twen-
ty-eight miles east of the battlefield, and borne to an Indian camp where, be-
sides the Colonel and Dr. Knight, were nine other prisoners. On the ioth
of June the prisoners were marched to Sandusky, over thirty miles distant,
accompanied by seventeen Delawares, who carried the scalps of four white
men. The next day, The Pipe and Wingenund visited them, The Pipe paint-
ing the faces of all the prisoners black. They were then marched to Wyan-
dot, a distance of eight miles, and thence to Tymochtee creek, where it was
distressingly evident that their doom was sealed. Here an Indian took pos-
session of Knight, who was to escort him to the Shawnees’ towns, distant,
as the Indian said, forty miles. The Doctor became somewhat sociable with
his red companion, and, as it was the 12th of June, the mosquitoes were
rather bothersome, so they concluded to build a fire to banish the little tor-
mentors. The Doctor, in poking up the fire, managed to secure a good dog-
wood club and, vigilant of an opportunity, delivered a staggering blow upon
the head of his custodian, precipitating him to the ground. Recovering from
the blow, the Indian sprang to his feet and scampered away, yelling in true
Indian fashion. This was Knight’s moment of escape, and gloriously did
he embrace it. Narrow indeed was his escape from the fagot and the tor-
mentor’s flame! Doctor Knight, after passing through Wayne county,
reached Fort Pitt July 4th, just twenty-one days after his escape.
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But no such story is to be recorded concerning poor Colonel Crawford.
Butterfield describes the inhuman burning of Crawford in these graphic
words :
“Crawford was stripped naked and ordered to sit down. The Indians
now beat him with sticks and their fists. The fatal stake — a post about fifteen
feet high — had been set firmly in the ground. Crawford’s hands were bound
behind his back, and a rope fastened, one end to the foot of the post and
the other to the ligature between his wrists. The rope was long enough for
him to sit down or walk around the post once or twice, and return the same
way. Crawford then called to Girty and asked if they intended to burn him.
Girty answered ‘Yes.’ He then replied he would take it all patiently. Upon
this Captain Pipe made a speech to the Indians, who, at its conclusion, yelled
a hideous and hearty assent to what had been said.
“The spot where Crawford was now to be immolated to satisfy the re-
vengeful thirst of the Delawares for the blood of the borderers, was in what
is now Crawford township, Wyandot county — a short distance northeast
from the present town of Crawfordsville.
“About four o’clock in the afternoon, on Tuesday, June n, 1782, the
awful torture began. The Indian men took up their guns and shot powder
into Crawford’s naked body, from his feet as far up as his neck. It was the
opinion of Knight that not less than seventy loads were discharged upon
him ! They then crowded about him and, to the best of Knight’s observation,
cut off both of his ears, for when the throng dispersed, he saw blood run-
ning from both sides of his head.
“The fire was about seven yards from the post to which Crawford
was tied. It was made of small hickory poles, burnt quite through in the
middle, each end of the pole remaining about six feet in length. Three or
four Indians, by turns, would take up, individually, one of these burning
pieces of wood and apply it to his naked body, already burnt black with
powder.
“These tormentors presented themselves on every side of him, so that
whichever way he ran around the post, they met him with the burning fagots.
Some of the squaws took broad boards, upon which they carried a quantity
of burning coals and hot embers, and threw the same on him, so that in a
short time he had nothing but coals of fire and hot ashes to walk on.
“In the midst of these extreme tortures, Crawford called to Girty and
begged of him to shoot him. Girty, by way of derision, told him he had no
gun. Crawford, at this period of his suffering, besought Almighty God to
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
have mercy on his soul, spoke very low, and bore his torments with the most
manly fortitude. He continued in all the extremities of pain for an hour and
three-quarters or two hours longer, as near as Knight could judge, when
at last, being almost spent, he lay down upon his stomach.
“The savages then scalped him, and repeatedly threw the scalp into the
face of Knight, telling him that was his great captain. An old squaw whose
appearance, thought Knight, every way answered the ideas people entertain
of the devil, got a board, took a parcel of coals and ashes and laid them upon
his feet and began to walk around the post. She next put burning sticks
to him, but he seemed more insensible of pain than before. Knight was
now taken away from the dreadful scene.
“Tradition is that Crawford’s life went out with the setting of the sun.
“The next morning in passing the spot, Knight witnessed the bones of
his old comrade and commander lying among the debris of the wasted flames
of the day before.
“Who that admires valor in the human breast can fail to appreciate, aye
even love, the God-like fortitude of this man. To be shot in battle, to be
stabbed to the heart by an assassin, would be a glorious release from the
bondage of a life compared with the damnable and diabolical process of dis-
possessing the startled soul of its raiment of flesh.”
While it is true that the Indians did not follow the retreating army as
a body farther than the eastern line of Crawford county, some of the strag-
glers were pursued much farther. A party of six was overtaken in Wayne
county by some Shawnee scouts, and two of them murdered. Their names
are not now known.
The story of Philip Smith, who was shot in his arm and who became
separated from the command, is one of unusual interest. He was but a young
man, a native of Pennsylvania, born in 1761. He was likewise a pioneer
of Ohio, and came to Wayne county in 1811. He was the father of Nathan
W. Smith, of Wooster township.
Isaac Newkirk, of Washington county, Pennsylvania, grandfather of
John W. Newkirk, of Clinton township, and Narcissa L., wife of Benjamin
Douglas (recently deceased), was a volunteer in this expedition, and it is
believed that it was he who discovered, during their encampment there, near
Odell’s lake, the widely known Newkirk spring. He was so delighted with it
and the beautiful surrounding prairies and wooded uplands, that he subse-
quently entered a section of these lands.
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The above account of the famous Crawford campaign has been largely
quoted from the extracts and radical historical points, as given in Butter-
field’s and Ben Douglas’s account of it, and will no doubt ever be considered
the true statement of fact as to the points visited and the movements made
by this little pioneer army who sought to defend the frontier settlers as
against the cruel Indian tribes.
BEAl/s CAMPAIGN l8l2.
What was and is still referred to as “Beall’s army,” consisted of a regi-
ment of raw, undisciplined Ohio militia, with, perhaps, an ingredient of
similar material from some of the western counties of Pennsylvania. But
little can be obtained from the government archives or state papers concern-
ing this campaign — indeed Ben Douglas almost gave the task up as useless.
However, to his labors are we indebted for the knowledge we do possess,
and which is here imparted to the reader.
Prior to the war of 1812 General Beall, who had served in the regular
army and who had removed to Columbiana county, Ohio, in 1803, was made
colonel of the militia of said county, and subsequently a brigadier-general.
After the surrender of Hull, August 16, 1812, a terrible consternation seized
upon the whole community, whereupon a detachment of the militia was or-
ganized under Beall and turned in the direction of the western frontier.
He marched his detachment to Canton, Stark county, Ohio, where additions
were made to it from Stark and Jefferson counties, etc., enlarging its rank
and file to the dimensions of a full regiment. No time was lost in organiz-
ing the new militia companies, when a regular frontier campaign was inaug-
urated. Reaching the Wayne county line, they passed through Sugarcreek
township and Paint township, thence on to Wooster where they made a
brief encampment; thence to the northwest, crossing the Big Killbuck a few
rods north of the old salt works, on the line of the Indian trail ; thence west
and south to the farms of John A. Lawrence, Esq., and Joshua Warner, Sr.,
about two miles west of Wooster; thence due west, near the line of the state
road, passing through or near the present site of Jefferson and Reedsburg,
in Plain township; thence on to Jeromeville, and going to the north of
Hayesville, Ashland county ; thence to the Huron, Sandusky and Fort Meigs.
Throughout this march General Beall accompanied the army to Camp Huron,
where he joined the troops of the Western Reserve, under Gen. Elijah Wads-
worth and Gen. Simon Perkins. Here they were personally visited by the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
commander-in-chief, Gen. William Henry Harrison, who organized all the
troops into a single brigade, devolving the command upon General Perkins.
From this point General Beall returned home.
A detachment of three hundred men, under Major Cotgreve, were at one
time ordered to the relief of General Winchester, but, hearing of the disaster
that had befallen that officer, they retreated to the Rapids where General
Harrison was stationed, and who retired to Carrying river, for the purpose
of forming a junction with the troops in the rear and favoring the convoy
of artillery and stores then coming from Upper Sandusky. What proportion
of the army of General Beall was at the siege of Fort Meigs is not now
known, but possibly all of them. His army was an eager, patriotic band,
composed largely of farmers and their sons, though their march was seem-
ingly an irregular one and at times widely scattered and without the order
of military discipline, but their patriotism was none the less genuine. As
far as Camp Huron it presented but few obstacles, and was characterized by
sudden alarms, scouts, scares and skirmishes. Beyond that, its part in the
drama is only seen by dim lights and almost disappears in the excitement
of the actors in the heavier scenes.
There can be no doubt that the transit of this army through the country
was a source of terror to the Indians, and that its very presence was a great
protection to the early settlers against their murderous invasions.
Thomas Eagle, who settled in Mohican township, then Wayne, but
now in Ashland county, in May, 1809, piloted Beall’s army from Wooster
to Jeromeville and on farther west, and it was by the direction of this officer
that the old fort at Jeromeville was built. He also took the Jerometown In-
dians prisoners, and Baptiste Jerome’s wife and daughter, who shortly after
died, an act for which the General was criticized.
General Beall, during the earlier stages of the war, caused the arrest
of Jerome on the grounds of disloyalty and had him incarcerated in Fort
Stidger for a short period.
BATTLE OF THE COW PENS.
The following concerning the battle of the Cow Pens is the account
given in Knapp’s History of Ashland County, and also verified by others :
“In the summer of 1812 General Beall passed through Ashland county
with the army, composed mostly of the militia and mounted volunteers, on
their way to Fort Meigs. They encamped for two weeks upon what is now
known as the Griffin farm, about one mile and a half northeast of the present
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47
village of Haysville. While there one dark night, when it was raining, when
the army was \vrapped in slumber and not dreaming of war, when
nothing was heard but the patter of the rain and the sentinel’s cry 'AH is
well/ there came, borne upon the damp night air, the sharp, shrill
crack of a rifle. The sentinels rushed in and reported the enemy upon them.
The drums beat to arms, horses neighed, bugles sounded. The ground trem-
bled with the dull thud of squadrons tramping. The order was given to
'Fire/ and never before or since was such a noise and din heard in Ver-
million as there was on that eventful night. The cavalry charged in the di-
rection of the supposed enemy, but, finding no person or thing, they returned
from the charge and reported that the foe had retreated ; but when the first
gray of morning appeared, the outposts discovered that they had been firing
upon a herd of cattle belonging to the settlers, which had been roam-
ing through the woods, and had slaughtered seventeen. This was afterward
known among the soldiers as 'The battle of the Cow Pens/ and was the only
engagement in which many of them were employed, although others gave
vent to the patriotism that filled their bosoms and yielded up their lives upon
the bloody ramparts of Fort Meigs.”
LATEST TRIBES OF WAYNE COUNTY INDIANS.
Fortunate indeed it was that the early settlers did not have to fight
and defend themselves against the savage Indians as did the pioneers in
other sections of Ohio and farther west, especially in Indiana, where the
Prophet and his brother, old Tecumseh, made long and bloody war upon
the whites. But little Indian blood was shed by the early settlers among the
few skirmishes that occasionally took place.
The Delawares, Wyandots, Shawnees, etc., were among the most nu-
merous and the last tribes of the red race to roam over Wayne county soil,
as they gave a last farewell look upon this fertile and goodly domain and
receded to the far-off West.
THE DELAWARES.
According to Heckwelder, the Moravian, the Delawares, from a tradi-
tion of their tribe, possessed the western portion of this continent, — the
Lenni Lenape supposed to be residing there, — but in the distant and receding
ages they traveled eastward to the Mississippi, where they encountered the
warlike Iroquois, with whom they formed a league against other tribes.
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Successful in their achievements, they arrogated to themselves all the territory
east of the Mississippi, whereupon a division was made, in which the Dela-
wares extended themselves to the Potomac, Susquehanna, Hudson and Dela-
ware rivers.
In 1650 the Five Nations subjugated them and they were again reduced
to vassalage by their old confederates, the Iroquois. A westward movement
was afterwards made by the larger portion of them, when they recrossed the
Alleghany mountains and finally, about 1768, made their chief settlements
in Ohio. In the Revolutionary struggle with England these Indians stood
with Great Britain. They grew riotous over the defeat of St. Clair and
danced and yelled and got drunker than King Bacchus himself.
In 1795 the United States obtained possession of their lands on the Mus-
kingum and they were removed to the Wabash valley in Indiana, where they
remained until 1819, when they went toward the setting sun. Some of the
branch tribes did not follow the main tribe, however, but for a time remained
in the East, hovering around Pittsburg, but ultimately journeyed West. The
Wolf tribe was one of the branches of which Captain Pipe was a notable chief,
and who experienced much savage, delirious joy in the roasting of Colonel
Crawford, mentioned elsewhere in this chapter. Of this tribe and quality
were the Delawares, who roamed over Wayne county at an early day and
were here when the whites first came in.
THE WYANDOTS.
These Indians were a fragmentary tribe from out the Tobacco nation of
the great Hurons. Judge Jeffries is authority for the following concerning
these people.
“In the dispersion of the Hurons, after halting for a time at Michilli-
mackinac, being there attacked by the Iroquois, they removed to the islands
at the mouth of Green bay, where they fortified on the main land. Here they
were pursued by the Iroquois and for safety went southward to the domains
of the Illinois, from thence westward to the Mississippi and country of the
Sioux, where their stay was very short, as the Sioux soon drove them beyond
their lines. Their next place of residence was at the southern extremity of
Lake Superior, which country they abandoned in 1671 and emigrated to
Michillimackinac. They did not remain upon this land, but located in the
northern part of Michigan, and later many of the tribe settled near Detroit
and on the Sandusky river in Ohio. There they went by the name of the
Wyandots. They wielded great influence over the neighboring tribes. Tra-
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dition traces them back no farther than the landing of the French at Quebec
in 1535. They were many years neighbors and friendly with the Senecas,
and left their ancient lands and took up a residence near Green bay. After
the French had supplied the Senecas with guns, powder and lead, they made
another attack upon the Hurons at Green bay and at first were entirely suc-
cessful, but by the strategem of the Hurons all the Senecas were cut off, not
one of the war party remaining alive to tell the sad tale of blood.
“The Wyandots thereafter, also being furnished with arms and muni-
tions of war, resolved to return to their own country in the vicinity of Detroit.
On the way thither they encountered the Senecas on the lake, in the vicinity
of Long Point, where a desperate battle was fought upon the water, in which
the Wyandots were victors. Not a single Seneca escaped and the Wyandots’
loss was very heavy. This was the last battle between the Wyandots and
Senecas. The former took an active part on behalf of the French in the war
which resulted in the reduction of Canada by the English, and were a potent
power against the English in Pontiac’s war.
“By the timely treaty of September 29, 1817, between the Wyandots and
the federal government there was granted to the former a body of land twelve
miles square, the center of which was the fort, now the site of Upper San-
dusky, the county seat of Wyandot county, Ohio. Also, at the same time,
was granted them a tract of a mile square on Broken Sword creek. They
occupied these lands until July, 1843, when they emigrated to their present
place of residence west of the Mississippi river, having disposed of their lands
by treaty in 1842. At the time of their emigration they numbered about
seven hundred.”
THE SHAWNEES.
The Shawnees were called the Bedouins of the American wilderness, and
were a savage, bloodthirsty and warlike tribe. Their blood leaped with the
hot blood of the South, whence they came. From Georgia they were driven
to Kentucky by other and more peaceful tribes, and from Kentucky they came
North, some of their number settling in Chillicothe, on the Scioto river, while
others centered near Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Their territory extended from
Sandusky and westward toward the great Miami. They were ever at war.
The great war chief, Tecumseh. was of this tribe, as was also his brother,
the great Indian Prophet, who fought the famous battle of Tippecanoe, in
Indiana, November 7, 1811, against General Harrison.
Taylor in his “History of Ohio,” says, “For forty years the Shawnees
were in almost perpetual warfare with America, either as British colonies or
(4)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
as independent states. They were among the most active allies of the French
during the Seven Years war, and after the conquest of Canada, continued,
in concert with the Delawares, hostilities which were only terminated after
the successful campaign of General Boquet. Under the treaty of Greenville,
in 1795, they lost nearly the whole of the territory which they held from the
Wyandots, and a part of them, under the guidance of old Chief Tecumseh,
again joined the British standard during the war of 1812-14.”
Thus it will be observed that the Delawares, Wyandots and Shawnees
— the first to occupy the valley of the Muskingum and thence to Lake Erie
and the Ohio river, asserting possession over nearly one-half of the domain
contained now within Ohio — were asserting possession through a stubborn
antagonism to the American people and the cause of our national independence.
Their fiendish cavorts, warring and plundering raids included vast areas, and
to this hour fading and unfading drops of blood mark the line of their ac-
cursed marauds.
* INDIANS OF WAYNE COUNTY, STRICTLY SPEAKING.
The Indians that inhabited Wayne county, as now bounded, when the
first settlers came in to make for themselves homes and to develop the country,
seemed to exist by an implied tenure. A dread of the whites, akin to fear,
apparently possessed these Indians. Something like a haunting memory of
the crimes of their race was ever upon them. Not mutual or even tribal
relations existed among them, and their pacific dispositions towards the
early settlers presented but another distinctive characteristic of the Indian —
the cunning caution and self-interest begotten of fear itself. They roamed
in pairs, or squads of a half dozen, though in some of their villages and set-
tlements they would collect together to the number of two hundred, three
hundred and sometimes as high as four hundred. In Clinton, East Union,
Franklin and Chippewa townships they congregated in largest numbers.
Their sudden disappearance from the county was most remarkable, occurring,
as it were, in a single night, and that, too, soon after the war of 1812-14 had
been announced. They scented the bad breath of the coming carnival and
hastened westward to deepen the blood stain of their hands.
WAYNE COUNTY INDIAN TRAILS.
The trail of the American Indian was to be plainly seen on every hand
when the first pioneers came to Wayne county, but with the passing of the
decades they have become forever lost, living only in tradition and for the
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most part in surmise. In Hutchins’ history of the celebrated expedition of
General Boquet against the western Indians in 1764, in which the English
marched an army of one thousand five hundred men into and through what
is Tuscarawas county, Ohio, to the forks of Muskingum river, he refers to
five different routes from Fort Pitt (Pittsburg) through the Ohio wilder-
ness. The route that most concerns this county and its people was as follows :
“Second route, west-northwest, was twenty-five miles to the mouth of .
Big Bever, ninety-one miles to Tuscaroras in Stark county, sixty miles to
Mohican John’s Town (in Mohican township, near Jeromeville), forty-six
miles to Junandat, or Wyandot Town ; four miles to Fort Sandusky, twenty-
four miles to Fremont, Sandusky county. The total distance from Fort
Pitt was two hundred and sixteen miles to Fort Sandusky; to Sandusky river
two hundred and forty miles.”
This trail penetrated Wayne county in section 12, Paint township; thence
in a northwesterly direction, crossing over sections 32, 31 and 30 in Sugar-
creek township; thence entering East Union township on section 25, bearing
north to section 24; thence more directly west, passing about a mile north
of Edinburg; thence to Wooster township, entering it from the east in sec-
tion 13, and thence to the Indian settlement south of Wooster and on the
site of the old Baptist burying ground. From that point in a northwesterly
direction, cutting zig-zag through the southwestern part of what is now the
city of Wooster, crossing the Henry Myers farm, passing the old salt-lick;
thence crossing the Killbuck creek a few rods north of the public bridge on the
Ashland highway; thence west across the old Hugh Culbertson farm; thence
for quite a distance along the line of the Ashland road; thence in a north-
western direction to Reedsburg, in Plain township; thence to Mohican John’s
Town, and thence on to Fort Sandusky.
INDIAN CHIEF KILLBUCK.
This noted Indian was of the Delaware tribe and was much displeased
at the action of Braddock’s army, and at a war council he, in conjunction with
another chief, Shingiss, made the following scathing speech :
“We know well what the English want. Your own traders say that you
intend to take all our lands and destroy us. It is you who have begun the
war. Why do you come here to fight? How have you treated the Dela-
wares? You know how the Iroquois deceived us into acting as peace media-
tors; how they shamed us, and took our arms; put petticoats on us; called
us women, and made us move three times away from our homes. And whv?
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Because the English paid them a few beads and blankets, and paint, and when
their senses were stolen away with fire-water they sold our lands ; but we tell
you this must cease. We are no longer women, but,” striking his breast,
“men — men who can strike, and kill and — Yes,” hissed out old Shingiss,
springing to his feet, rising to his full stature, his wicked little eyes flashing
a venomous fire, “we are men and no longer women! We have thrown off
the petticoat of the squaw, and have seized the keen tomahawk of the brave.
I speak,” stamping his foot, “as one standing on his own ground. Why do
you come to fight on our land? Keep away! French and English. The
English are poor and stingy. They give us nothing but a few beads, some
bad rum, and old worn-out guns, which kick back and break to pieces; and
their traders cheat us and fool us and our squaws and maidens. But I tell
you we won’t suffer it longer.”
MASSACRE OF SIXTEEN INDIANS AT WOOSTER.
The following account of an Indian massacre at Wooster was so graph-
ically given in Ben Douglas's History of Wayne County (1878) that it
is here reproduced :
“As we have said, our early settlements were made pretty generally in
peace, and therefore we are barren of anything thrilling and startling in way
of border strife. One hostile demonstration, however, occurred, which we
propose to narrate, within the present corporation of Wooster, with the cir-
cumstances and details of which but few if any of the surviving pioneers
of Wayne county have any knowledge.
“This incident itself so little resembles a fierce Indian struggle, the
heroes of which sensational and resolute narrators too frequently seek to invest
with apotheosis, that only in its more liberal interpretation can be embraced
in the catalog of great border exploits. It is the only violent collision that we
have to chronicle transpiring within the present limits of the county between
the pale and the copper faced.
“A gang of Indians intent on a foraging expedition started from the
region of Sandusky in an easterly direction, and in the course of their hunt-
ing and predatory peregrinations succeeded in reaching the white settle-
ments on the banks of the Ohio and near Raccoon creek, some distance from
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Their sole object being plunder and theft, without
regard for sacrifice of human life, they crossed the river in bark canoes and
for a while mingled with the whites, in apparent friendship, who had estab-
lished quite a colony there. When opportunity, ‘foul abettor,’ furnished a
safe occasion for it, these remorseless devils and incarnate fiends, with their
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53
antipathy and hatred of the pale face, pounced upon and murdered five of
their number, and burned to the ground seven dwellings, together with the
families they -sheltered. This act of diabolism and hellish slaughter very
naturally aroused the community. Blood called for blood. The insulted
silence of the air broke into echoes of revenge.
“A company of thirty men, fearless of flints and fate, was immediately
organized for the purpose of pursuit and punishment. The command was
taken charge of by Capt. George Fulkes, the peer of Brady in Indian war-
fare. Better indeed than Brady did he know their character, for at the age
of three years he had been stolen by the Indians from his father, then living
on the Raccoon creek, they retaining charge of him until he was a man,
when his father bought him from them and restored him to his family. Later
Brady became an expert Indian fighter. After crossing the river with their
plunder, and apprehensive that they might be followed, the Indians observed
the precaution of cutting the bottoms out of their canoes, and made great
haste to retrace their steps in the direction from which they came. Could
they but reach Sandusky with their stolen goods they would be safe enough.
“Keenly alive to the immediate pursuit that might take place and de-
termined to run down and exterminate the murderers, no time was lost in
the outset. The river was dashed over. The track of the fleeing assassins
was soon scented. Indications eventually pointed to the fact that they were
in proximity to the fugitives, but whether the Indians knew this or not we
are not apprized. Late one evening. Captain Fulkes and his men, from what
is known now as Robinson's Hill, a short distance south from Wooster, dis-
covered the camp fires of the enemy on what is now the Point, or Flat-iron,
at the intersection of South Bever street and Madison avenue, in the present
limits of the city of Wooster. Avoiding all rashness and adopting the policy
of caution, he concluded to make no attack that evening. So. to elude de-
tection, they crossed over to Rice’s hollow, remaining there for the night, or
until the moon arose, when preparations were made for the assault. The
arrangements completed, the advance was made and the Indian camp sur-
rounded. At a given signal they fired upon them, killing fifteen, all of the
party with the exception of one who had gone to the bottoms to look after
the traps. Hearing the noise of the musketry he rushed in the direction of
the camp and, calling to Captain Fulkes, who understood some dialect, asked,
‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Come on,’ shouted Fulkes, ‘nothing is the matter.'
The Indian advanced toward Fulkes, but when within a few paces of him an
unruly lad perforated his carcass with a bullet.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
“A shallow grave was scooped upon the Point before described, and
here the sixteen Indians were rolled together and earthed over, their spirits
having been unceremoniously delivered to the keeper of the Happy Hunting
Ground.
“Of Captain Fulkes we know but little, save that he was a bold Indian
fighter.”
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CHAPTER III.
GLACIATION, ARCHAEOLOGY, MOUND BUILDERS, ETC.
By J. H. Todd, M. D.
INTRODUCTION.
In Douglas’ History of Wayne County there is a very concise descrip-
tion of the geological structure, but not a clear differentiation of the two
almost equal halves of the county.
It is generally known that in the south and east half of the county is
found coal (all of the seven veins being represented) and many hilltops are
capped with lime, while in the north and west there is no coal and no lime-
stone. Now the dividing line between these widely separated geological for-
mations is a preglacial river bed extending from Loudonville to Shreve and
on by Wooster and Orrville to Sterling and from here, my own observations
lead me to believe, it went north through Chippewa lake and the old and deep
channel of Rocky river to Lake Erie. But Frank Leveret, of the United
States geologic survey and who has examined the ground, favors a route
from Sterling by Warwick and the Copley marsh to the Cuyahoga river and
through it to Lake Erie.
Leveret says (pages 163-5, Monographs of the U. S. Geological Sur-
vey) : “J. H. Todd has recently called attention to evidence that the lower
courses of these tributaries of the Mohican creek had an eastward discharge.
There is a continuous valley or lowland with an average width of about a
mile following the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago railroad from Mans-
field to Wooster, Ohio. East of Wooster there is a great drift accumulation,
rising nearly two hundred feet above Killbuck valley, but it is Todd’s opinion
that the old valley continued in that direction about ten miles, to the vicinity
of Orrville, where a valley is found with very low rock floor.
“This valley seems to have drained northward either to Rocky river
or the Cuyahoga, passing Sterling.
“The writer is inclined to favor the view that this valley had a course
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
eastward from Sterling to Warwick, and thence north past New Portage and
Copley marsh into the old Cuyahoga, that being a larger valley than the old
Rocky river valley.
“Todd, however, favors the Rocky River valley as the line of discharge
into Lake Erie.
“The valley under discussion, with its deep filling of drift, shows general
eastward descent, as indicated in the table given later. The available data
concerning the rock floor shown in the table, though meager, also favor the
view that it slants eastward. It furnishes a more natural trunk line than
any other old line of drainage yet found in that region. The several tribu-
taries of the Mohican creek converge toward this old valley and seems to find
in it a natural line of discharge. This old line may properly be termed the
Old Mohican."
Further, Leveret says, in writing of Killbuck : “It is quite certain
that the old valley which leads northward along the Killbuck as above noticed
from Shreve to Wooster, did not continue along this creek beyond Wooster.
* * * * The continuation of that old valley (the Old Mohican) was
probably eastward, as suggested by Todd.”
Again Leveret says: “A large part of Killbuck valley apparently once
discharged northward to the Old Mohican, for there is a marked narrowing
of the valley in passing southward down the present stream.”
So here we have our pre-glacial river authoritatively established from
Loudonville to Sterling at least, and supplemented by the Killbuck channel
from the col near Killbuck village in the coal region to where it joins the
axial channel six miles below Wooster, developing a tripod lake two by three
miles in extent, and this river is now, although no man ever saw it, named
the Old Mohican.
We have found from investigation and examination of fossils, that this
ancient river ran exactly around the northeast head of an island that repre-
sents the oldest dry land in the United States — an island standing sentinel in
both a Silurian and Devonian sea — ages before the Alleghany mountains
were evolved or the coals of the carboniferous age had filled the Allegheny
basin, to form, out of carboniferous conglomerate, an eastern bank to our
river.
I also find the line of the Old Mohican marked by the Waverly clay (as
reported in the “Soil Survey" of the county). The Waverly shale was
ground to clay in the glacial mill as it came up our valley from Sterling to
Orrville, and erosive streams have since carried the Waverly sand over the
new valley and deposited it as a soil nine to twelve inches in depth.
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It really makes no difference to Wayne county whether the waters in
the Old Mohican went from Sterling by the Rocky river, or the Cuyahoga,
to Lake Erie, for all the writer claims, from original investigation, is that
there is a deep and wide preglacial river bed, now filled with drift, from
Loudonvillc, through Wayne county to Sterling, and that the channel passes
exactly between the Waverly hills of the Cincinnati incline and the coal
measure conglomerate, and that it carried all the waters of all Mohican’s
branches, together with the reversed Killbuck and Sugar creek, north to the
bed of Lake Erie.
PREGLACIAL TOPOGRAPHY.
In order to give any clear idea of the glaciation of Wayne county it is
necessary to take into consideration the preglacial topography, of not only
Wayne, but of all the adjacent counties, for the drainage streams derive
their headwaters in almost all instances from springs in neighboring counties,
and many of the streams are reversed in at least part of their flow, — the red
lines in the accompanying map indicate the preglacial, and the black the
present drainage of the district, — while the highest hills and practically all
drainage lines have been so modified by the glacial drift — in some places four-
hundred feet thick — that the preglacial aspect of the county is not now recog-
nizable.
The nature and magnitude of the glacial effects are beyond conception.
You must give wings to your imagination to contemplate the picture, even
after carefully considering the altitudes and depressions I will give you.
Wayne county rests on the northeast face of what was, in the dawn of
the earth’s organic history, an island in a Silurian sea, and a large arm
of the Atlantic, known as the “trough of the coal measures/’ which was a
warm sea with only the lowest order of life existing in its depths, afterwards
surrounded it. This island, or low mountain chain, extended from San-
dusky, Ohio, far into Kentucky, while its breadth was from forty to one
hundred and twenty miles, and it is now known geologically as the “Cincin-
nati Arch,” or “Anticline:” poetically it has been called the “Lost Atlantis.”
In Ohio, and particularly in Wayne county, it presents in relief, and
shows bold headlands, while in Kentucky it is in intaglio and was once sub-
merged to receive the limestone that constitutes the “Blue Grass region.”
Here, in Wayne county, the arch is capped by Waverly sandstone and shale,
as can be seen at the Reddick quarry, the Coe quarry, along the Christian
run and at the shale brick works west of the city, where many characteristic
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fossils are to be found, particularly crinoidea, conularia and productus. At
these points there seems to be an association with the Devonian and lower
carboniferous ages.
In studying the Waverly group of rocks in this part of the island, I find
a crescent of highest rock hills in the state, extending by Smithville Summit
in Wayne to West Salem, Polk, in Ashland, and Mansfield, Belleville, and
Independence, in Richland counties, which constitute a continental divide
from which the rock strata dips away on the west under the coal fields of
Indiana, on the north under the bed of Lake Erie, while on the east they
decline gradually into the synclinal trough of the Allegheny coal basin. This
constitutes a watershed in three directions and Professor Newberry says (in
Vol. 1 of Geological Survey of Ohio), “It will be noticed that the direction
of the drainage streams, which follow the strike of the strata on either side,
indicate that it once formed a watershed that gave the initial bearing to their
flow.”
It did more, for the fresh water from these many streams meeting the
water of different density, temperature and chemic composition would create
a current around the shore of the island.
If you will go with me, carrying an aneroid barometer to note elevations,
from Wooster, by Mifflin, to Belleville, in Richland county, you will cross
all the streams at points of original scoring that drained the northeast face
of this headland and carried their waters to the channel of the Old Mohican.
Starting at Wooster University, we find it stands five hundred and twen-
ty-two feet above Lake Erie; Killbuck valley, three hundred and thirty-two
feet; Jefferson, near rock summit of plateau, six hundred feet; the flood plain
of Muddy fork, four hundred and thirty-two; and the divide between this
and the Jerome fork of the Mohican, six hundred and fifty, while its flood
plain is four hundred and fifty; Hayesville, on the summit of the divide be-
tween the Jerome and Black forks, seven hundred, and the flood plain of the
Black fork at Mifflin is five hundred feet ; the depot at Mansfield, five hundred
and eighty-one: the plateau south of the city, eight hundred, and above Belle-
ville, nine hundred. In the cross section from Ashland to Loudonville the
divide between the Jerome and Black forks — independent of glacial deposit —
is nearly a level plain, with only a gradual descent of fifty to seventy-five
feet. But these elevations do not mark the summit of our present hills nor
the heads of present streams, neither do they cover the preglacial drainage
of Congress and Chester townships. The old divide entered the county two
miles south of West Salem, and crossed the township diagonally south of
Congress village and crosses what is nowr the Killbuck one mile north of
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Overton, and, entering Wayne township, it intersects a north and south divide
from Burbank to Wooster, but continues on across Wayne into Greene town-
ship, ending With and marking the head of the island east of Smithville,
where the strata, badly crushed and eroded, dips under the bed of the Old
Mohican. The north and south divide is a continuance of the divide between
the Black and Rocky rivers and passing east of Lodi and Burbank
nearly parallels the Killbuck from Burbank to Overton, but here deflects
southeast to Wooster, where Wooster University stands on a pinnacle of Wa-
verly one hundred and seventy-two feet above the city’s square. By this cross-
ing of the divides near Overton we had in evidence a range of highest pre-
glacial hills in the county. The rocks here banking the Killbuck are now less
than eighty rods apart, although nearly two hundred feet high, and the stream
runs on a rock bottom for half a mile, while from the crests of the hills drain-
age lines were projected in four directions. All the waters of northeastern Con-
gress township were carried, with the waters of Killbuck from Overton,
through an old preglacial channel one and one-half miles west of Burbank
to the Black river, west of Lodi and thence to Lake Erie. The district south
of the divide in Chester and Congress townships — save a fringe of drainage
into the Muddy fork of the Mohican — was carried into a preglacial channel
leading by Ft. Hill to Wooster and ending in the Old Mohican near the Ap-
ple creek bridge. This channel is now followed by the Little Killbuck to Ft.
Hill and drains a large territory, carrying pure spring water that could and
should be utilized by Wooster, for it is gravel and sand filtered, and is avail-
able either by artesian or pump wells.
This Little Killbuck was in preglacial times the Big Killbuck — in fact,
the only Killbuck, for the drainage south from Overton was only a rivulet.
The Little Killbuck is now an anomaly, reversing the common law of creeks ;
it is a creek turned upside down. Its gravel bottom is now on top, supported
by a shelf of boulder clay and sand, and the water runs beneath except in
springtime freshets when its torrential waters carry great loads of gravel and
clay to its mouth and there bank it. In this way it has driven the channel
of Killbuck across the plain half a mile, where it is now eating out a bed from
the Waverly shale and sandstone on the Eicher farm, section 5. Two miles
to the south the new Apple creek has sent the Killbuck across the valley to the
western hills in the same manner, as I have found evidence of three distinct
channels of the Killbuck — each one long used — between the Cemetery hill and
its present bed, which hugs the shale and glacial hills on the west three-quarters
of a mile away, and between these old channels and the Apple creek the bea-
vers had their home-life fun in the quiet waters, held by the dams they built
from cedar logs which are now found in the buried channels.
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The drainage of the northeast section — that bounded by the Continental
and the north and south divide — included the bulk of Wayne and Canaan
townships. The three heads of the present and old Killbuck followed the
line of least resistance with the strike of the strata to near Jackson where
they united and carried their waters to the Old Mohican, near Sterling. But
in glacial times this channel was blocked by drift above Jackson and the waters
turned west to cut a new channel through the -shale of the north and south
divide to Burbank, nearly seven miles away, where the stream was again
turned at an obtuse angle into the old Killbuck channel, passing, after travel-
ing twenty-four miles, within one mile of the springs that form its head.
The drainage from the southwest of the divide from Overton to Wooster
is represented by the Clear creek and the Christmas run. The Clear creek
follows the strike of the strata in an old pfeglacial scoring to section 31 in
Wayne township, where the old channel to the fair ground by the shale works
was blocked by hundreds of feet of drift, creating beautiful terraces over the
John McSweeny and Yoder farms on section 5, Wooster township, and there
had to cut its way through the shales of the Eicher farm, section 6, to the
channel of the little Killbuck.
The Christmas run practically follows a preglacial over a boulder and
boulder clay bed, but now cuts into the shale on the Byres farm, southeast
quarter section 5, making a bed of the rock and giving the student a wealth
of Devonian fossils — stone lilies, productus shells and conularia for his
cabinet.
The drainage from Wooster University to the divide east of the summit
near Smithville, where the dip of the strata of stone determines the end of
the Cincinnati Arch, or Silurian island, the primitive rocks ran under, or were
torn out by the floods of the Old Mohican, and all drainage from the island
v as sucked into it. The Quimby's run and the Wayne county head of what
is now known as the Little Sugar creek were directed to the axial channel
around the head of the island, and their channels tell the story by their deep
dippings into the silurian rocks.
The rivulets and creeks that formed the heads of all preglacial streams
started from the rock with the dip of the rock and only marred the strike
of the strata by erosion as they proceeded. The valleys in which the larger
streams now run average — from rock summit to rock summit — about three-
fourths of a mile, but the rock floor averages about one hundred and fifty to
two hundred feet below the flood plain of the streams, the old channel being
filled to that depth with drift over which the present streams meander from
side to side like the wanderings of the old time snake, or even the present
black ones near Overton.
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This gives you a descriptive picture of the northeast face of this primi-
tive island, the first dry land in the United States; but can you reproduce it in
your minds? Can you contemplate it? The elements had been warring
on its sides and summits for thousands of years. Its pinnacles were eaten by
the winds as by acids. Its rocks were disintegrating. Its sides were scarred
with deep gullies, like miniature canyons, by erosion as the floods carried the
degraded rocks to the sea. The island was an empire of silence save for the
wild waves dashing against its scabrous sides, but there was no sense to feel
and no ear to hear save God’s. Desolation marked each nook and cranny.
There was no motion or sound of any living thing, for the atmosphere was
but a paste of carbon which no living beast nor creeping thing could breathe.
And yet! here is the foundation upon which God built up the northwest half
of Wayne county.
“The ways of the Maker are dark;
Who knows how God will bring them about?”
Professor Newbury again says, “A current from the south swept the east-
ern shore of our ‘Ancient Atlantis/ that floated the trunks of tree ferns and
branches of lepidodendron to Sandusky.” The waters were warm in this
Silurian sea and receiving the wild water from the island, with its load of de-
grant rock, coupled with the difference of temperature, specific gravity and
chemic composition refused to mingle and a current round the shore resulted,
and this current gave the initial direction to the preglacial stream which we
now denominate the Old Mohican, and which in after time carried not only
the waters of the Waverly capped island, but of the virgin coal fields as well
exactly between them to the great channel in the bed of Lake Erie.
As previously stated, a fringe of the drainage from the crest of the
continental divide south of West Salem was carried into the Muddy fork of
the Mohican. Now this stream follows a preglacial channel that drained the
southeast face of the incline from Perrysburgh to Polk and Rowsburgh in
Ashland county and passing between Rowsburgh in Ashland and Little Pitts-
burgh in Wayne county, it proceeded to the southwest corner of Chester town-
ship, where it entered Wayne county, and became a part and parcel of it. It
then continued in a slightly irregular course southeast to near Blachleysville.
on the bank of the Indian “Big Meadow” and the white man’s “Big Prairie”
in Plain township. Here it may have joined the large preglacial channel from
Ashland, passing by Jeromesville to the village of Big Prairie, or Custaloga.
on the Pittsburgh, Ft. Wayne & Chicago railroad, where it entered the axial
channel from Loudonville, now known as the Old Mohican.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
But there is another possible, if not probable, way which I will try to
explain. The entire south front or mouth of the Big Prairie was blocked by
glacial drift piled into hills hundreds of feet high which turned the waters of
both the Jerome and Muddy forks of the Mohican back upon themselves, cre-
ating a lake three hundred feet deep and one to three miles wide from Shreve
and Big Prairie to near Jeromesville.
Now through this lake-creating barrier a deep and wide preglacial chan-
nel has been discovered at the “Heller's Tavern" cross roads, about one mile
east of the Camp Station on the Ashland & Wooster railroad and this
channel continues to the old town of Millbrook and on across the D. Myres
farm (section 6, Franklin township) and connects with the Old Mohican near
Millbrook Station on the Pittsburg, Ft. Wayne & Chicago railroad.
This valley would have been followed by the Ashland & Wooster rail-
road to the Camp clay plant from Millbrook village instead of from Custaloga,
had not the engineer informed the projectors that their track could not be
maintained, for the waters of the Big Prairie would rush — in spring floods —
into the half-mile cut they would have to make through the glacial barrier,
thus creating a col through which the waters would not only flood the railroad,
but probably turn the Muddy fork of the Mohican into the Killbuck by Mill-
brook village, as the flood plain of the Big Prairie is over one hundred feet
higher than the plain of the Killbuck.
The north end of this buried channel so nearly meets a projection of the
Muddy fork near Blachlevsville across sections 29 and 31 of Plain township
that I think it probable the pre-glacial Muddy fork had its continuance to
the axial channel — the Old Mohican — by this route, leaving the Jerome fork
pass singly to some point between Shreve and Custaloga.
This completes my simple sketch of the northwest half of Wayne coun-
ty’s native rock formation and drainage lines and includes the townships of
Congress, Chester, Plain, Clinton, Wooster, Wayne and Canaan; also parts
of East Union, Greene and Milton.
There was a long time of waiting for the other half of Wayne county
to be created. The years are marked by the million, for the Alleghany moun-
tains were yet under the sea, their picturesque peaks were only a dream in
the plan of evolution, and even when they were up in the mist of the dense
atmosphere, there was a still longer wait before the broad arm of the ocean
fretting between our primitive island and the west Alleghanies gave way
to the carboniferous flora that preceded the formation and building up of the
Alleghany coal fields, with the seven veins of coal and the intervening strata
of shale, sand and conglomerate that now form the hills and vales of north-
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eastern Wayne county, and include the townships of Paint, Sugar Creek,
Baughman, Chippewa, Salt Creek and Franklin, with parts of East Union,
Greene and Milton. Each of these is underlaid with coal, with occasional
dove-tailings into the eroded channels of the Waverly.
Now that the rock foundation of half our county is completed, might it
not be well to contemplate the structure and its surroundings while waiting
the evolution of the other half and note the methods of the Maker and Keeper
and Controller of the universe in His creation of a continent?
Let us place on a pinnacle of the rock which is now graced by Wooster
University, a primitive man — a multi-millionaire (in years, not gold) — and
push his “nature's place” back in time a million years, but give him the sense
of a troglodyte, for he must have a sentience sufficient to feel the moving of the
spirit of God upon the waters around him and a perception of the spirit of
development under his feet in the island, the first dry land in the United
States, and which was then as a “babe in the womb,” but possessed of an in-
distinct uneasiness, waiting, but pulsing for the light that it might have life
in the open. Time was not, for the sun was hid by the vapors surrounding
the earth. The air was loaded with the heated earth’s distillate and in the
earth was only a thrill like a shudder of “life in death” to give promise of
a land plant that could live in this noxious air.
So only expectancy was beneath our millionaire's feet and all that was
before or behind him was the ocean,
“That glorious mirror where the Almighty’s form
Glasses itself in tempests.
That image of Eternity, from out whose slime
The monsters of the deep are made.”
This awfulness was his environment; while the desolate, naked crags of
Waverly sandstone, only relieved by the shrubless, lifeless, but soft expectant
shale, was beneath him in the island, which, like a chrysalis in its cocoon,
was waiting for its carbon case to break, that light might come in, and with
light life to the land plant.
I say expectant shale, because in the shales we find more of the active
principles of life than in all other strata. Whatever clumsy name you give to
the initial that the world’s Ordainer and the world’s Sustainer placed in the
earth to fructify it — “vis vita,” “primordial germ,” or “vital unit,” I refer you
to Genesis, which says, “Whose seed is in itself upon the earth,” and geo-
biology says the shales are largely its keeper.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
And these same shales dipped under the ocean, forming its bed and fur-
nished the first seaweed for the first animal life, while the laws governing this
evolution gave the formula, or working agency, by which Omnipotence cre-
ates continents and develops life on their surfaces. Distinctly had these laws
been operating in the evolution of life in the waters, for the ocean was teem-
ing with fishes which were early brought forth, receiving their food and oxy-
gen from the water they could live in, when land plants could not.
But suddenly this monotony is broken and gives place to one of nature’s
creative convulsions. Our man on his pinnacle senses deep rumblings and
dread tremblings. He is enveloped in lightnings and waves are dashed over
him. The sea is rising and the island is tilting. It seems like the end of all
things, but is only a second beginning, for when the catastrophe is over the
ocean bed has taken the place of the sea. Virgin land is up for its first bap-
tism in air. Nature’s gestation is over and world has a new and added land
with new aspirations and ne\v potentialities. Evolution has a new field where
we can study creative problems and note the factors and formula of develop-
ment.
The surface of the new land is one of ooze and slime, entombing the
mutilated bodies of fishes, and the salt of the sea is gathered into pools. But
an age passes while the fresh waters from our island on the west and the
Alleghanies is flooding the ooze and dissolving the salt and a dim light has
entered through the vapors above, and our man on the mountain sees lichens
clinging to the rocks, ferns and club mosses, and rushes growing between,
while the lowest forms of animal life are feeding on the fronds in what is
kno\vn as a coal marsh.
The coal plant must live and die in a swamp, for it must be covered
with water or mud when it falls, or it will not be transformed into coal. Our
multi-millionaire must wait thousands of years for this first cryptogamous
forest to flourish and fade.
But the time comes at last, and, with another convulsion, the land with
all its flora sinks from sight and the ocean is here again to receive the degra-
dation of the hills on the east and on the west and spread them over this
sunken virgin forest, that distillation may go on to purification and the forest
be presented to the twentieth century as perfect coal, and denominated coal
seam No. i.
Another period passes with the sea dominant; but the flight of time is
marked by change, and the bed of the sea is again inspired to rise, and on its
breast and in its ooze to grow a new and completer coal forest, with higher
orders of plant and animal life. So in the coals we find the fossil plants:
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Totems, or Tribal Symbols. About three- fifths natural size.
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the lepidodendron (the scaly tree), sometimes one hundred feet high and
twelve feet in circumference; the beautiful sigillaria (the seal tree), the giant
calamite, with hosts of lower forms of flowerless plants and these in such
profusion that a coal forest represented a tropical jungle, in which insect life
played a mysterious but conspicuous part.
These coal plants were the especial feature of the carboniferous age of
the Mesozoic time; in fact, a necessity in its evolution and preparation for the
future.
Plants are the only things that know how to manufacture living material
out of inorganic mud; but plants do not take all their food from the earth,
for they take up carbonic acid from the air through their leaves and decom-
pose it, retain the carbon, and give off the oxygen.
.'nimal life takes up oxygen and gives off carbonic acid. Now during
the carboniferous age the atmosphere was so charged with acid carbon that
no animal could live in it if permanently out of the water, so these forests
were inspired as a media to extract and lay up the carbon, and so utilize the
destructive element to animal life, and lay it down in coal for the future use
of man, for whose advent on earth the initial steps were being prepared.
Five times more this down of the ocean and up of the land was repeated.
The new land with all its flora and fauna went down seven times, putting the
forests to sleep in coal at each separate submergence and flattening the bones
of primitive life to fossil, thus forming the seven veins of coal found in our
Eastern hills.
Each time that the earth went down and the sea became master it brought
immense loads of degraded rock that the wild waves had torn from the con-
tinent and dashed into sand and mud and spread them over its bottom ; and
these, with the ground-up corals and shells and pebbles rolled into marble
forms, produced a new stratum between the coal seams and heightened the
hills of our growing country.
As said above, seven times was it necessary for a forest to grow and
appropriate the carbon in the air and lay it down in coal, to prepare a way
for air-breathing animals to have a permanent home on its surface. In the
last period of the coal formations the animal kingdom had greatly advanced.
When the first coals were put down the forms of life were all of the water
genera, but in the last w e had a rich and varied terrestrial vegetation and many
air-breathing animals, but there was a long lapse of time before the earth
was fitted for the higher orders — the prelude to man. With the close of the
carboniferous age, although our hills were completed and partially fitted for
(5)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
terrestrial vegetation, yet the upper factors of the Mesozoic aeon — the Triassic,
Jurassic and Cretaceous ages — the ages of reptiles and birds, together with
the Tertiary age, the age of mammals, was never represented in Ohio as in
other parts of the world, for Ohio was out of the water and has so remained
during all these ages. During all this vast period Wayne county was basking
in a gradually developing sunshine, and growing immense forests and putting
the leaves and dead branches down in humus, that grasses might grow and
flowering plants spring up and bloom, birds multiply and render the for-
ests vocal, preparing the way for man's advent in the county, which was par-
tially achieved when the hills were completed in the new half of Wayne
county. This new half is made up of other stuff than the first and older half,
for the University hill is a million, if not millions of years older than the Ex-
periment Station hill ; the former's rocks represent the Silurian and Devonian
aeons of the world’s organic history and present the earliest forms of perfect
life in their fossils, while the latter shows all the varied forms of flowerless
plants, from ferns to sigillaria, but no bird enlivened the scene. The hills
of the new half are made up of coal and conglomerate, capped with sand-
stone and limestone, chert and iron ore, through Wayne and Holmes coun-
ties, making, with the Waverly of the island, a bowl or hydrographic basin,
shaped almost like a huge mussel shell. Its southwest end is found between
Independence and Bellville in Richland county, and its axis is almost parallel
with that of Lake Erie, and this axis followed the primordial current around
the head of our Silurian island that carried the fresh water that flowed into
the salt sea from the island, creating the “Newberry current” around the
head of the “Incline” to the great northeast channel through the initial Lake
Erie, and now, after the development of the coal measure hills, drains both
the island and the virgin coal hills into a slightly curved channel passing dis-
tinctly from Loudonville to Sterling, and thence by Rocky river to Lake Erie,
and now known as the Old Mohican, for in the ancient time all the branches
of the Big Mohican drained northeast through this deep and wide waterway,
running exactly between the base of the Silurian island and the carboniferous
conglomerate.
The rock floor of this river — that no man ever saw — is at Loudonville,
two hundred and sixty-two feet above Lake Erie; at the railroad bridge over
the Lake fork, two hundred and forty -five; at Odel's lake, two hundred and
twenty-eight ; at Big Prairie, two hundred and fourteen ; at Custaloga, two
hundred and ten; Slireve, two hundred; near Millbrook Station, one thousand
eight hundred and eightv-five, and one and a half miles south of Wooster, one
hundred and forty-seven feet. At the Mock farm, section 6, East Union town-
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ship, no rock was struck at one thousand eight hundred and eighty-five feet.
Wellhead, three hundred and forty-five, which proves less than one hundred
and sixty; but here we encounter mountains of drift, and no wells have been
drilled into them, so the channel is obscured, but near Orrville it enters the
great Orrville swamp, or lake, and through it the channel proceeds to Ster-
ling, where is found four hundred and nine feet of drift and the rock floor
many feet below the present face of Lake Erie. From this you see the chan-
nel’s decline from Loudonville to Sterling, and the Black fork from Mansfield
follows an old preglacial bed, having the same general decline to Loudon-
ville, while the Jerome fork from Ashland, the Muddy fork from Rowsburgh,
the Little Killbuck from West Salem and the reversed Killbuck from Millers-
burgh all show a similar descent into the axial channel — the Old Mohican. The
continental divide leaves Richland county near Independence, passes irregu-
larly through Holmes county to Chestnut ridge, between the Black and Wolf
creeks, here crosses Killbuck and proceeds to the south of Baltic, Ragersville
and Dundee, and connects with the divide noted by Frank Leverett as cross-
ing the Big Sugar creek between Strausburgh and Canal Dover. So the rim
of the elongated bowl commenced near Garden Isle in the “Harrisville
Swamp,” and included West Salem, Polk, Ashland, Mansfield, Bellville, Kill-
buck, Dundee, Massillon, Warwick and practically ended at the River Styx
and the preglacial drainage lines from this crest of highest hills all converged
to a central axis — the Old Mohican.
Those from the island side have been noted, and I will now briefly indi-
cate the principal ones from the carboniferous side. The first on the west
was a small channel coming in just south of Loudonville and draining the
high hills of Hanover township ; it is now crossed by the new bed of the Clear
fork. Drake’s valley, from Nashville to Lakeville, marks the line of the
second. The third drained the limestone hills of Ripley township and en-
tered the main waterway just west of Shreve. This takes us to the south
exposure of the limestone ridge of Ripley township, and all its waters were
directed by the dip of the rock to the Paint Valley channel, which started near
Nashville and entered the Killbuck near Holmesville. The next and princi-
pal tributary is the great Killbuck channel, in which the waters are now
reversed from the col at Killbuck village. This valley gradually widens
and deepens until it enters the Old Mohican between Wooster and Shreve.
The sixth channel is a smaller one, coming in between coal hills, two miles
south of Millersburgh. The seventh comes in through a fissure between
Holmesville and Holmes county infirmary. It is now occupied in part by
Martin’s creek. The channel is wide and two hundred feet deep. The eighth
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
in order drained a large part of Salt Creek and Paint townships in both
Wayne and Holmes counties, and the valley is probably of more importance
to the people of Wayne county than all the others combined, for it furnishes a
series of flowing wells of purest water. Its head is represented by Dry run,
passing down a fissure between the hills southwest of the south branch of Salt
creek, and ended in the Salt creek valley near the tile factory, below Freder-
icksburgh. At this point is located the col in the big Salt creek, and over
this broken-down col the waters now go tearing over a rocky bed and be-
tween rock hills to Holmesville, where the debris is landed in beautiful ter-
races. From Fredericksburgh the old channel passed almost due north to
old Edinburgh, where it was joined by a preglacial channel coming in from
Kidron by Apple creek. It then took a northwest direction through the val-
ley of the Apple creek to Honeytown, where it entered the Old Mohican.
The ninth is the mysterious Big Sugar creek, a reversed stream, the col
being near the falls below Beach City. The next is Newman’s creek, that
the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago railroad follows from Massillon to
Orrville. The eleventh is represented by Patton’s lake, Fox lake and Red
run. The twelfth is represented by Chippewa creek, now forming the west
head of the Tuscarawas, which is known to be a reversed stream from near
Strausburgh.
Here I must call your attention to a feature in the location of these pre-
glacial channels tint will assist you in determining the necessity of the axial
channel or Old Mohican, and it will be better understood by referring to the
accompanying map. viz. : All the channels described enter the axial channel
through fissures or gorges in the hills that deepen and widen as they proceed
from the hills to their mouths, and this explains the mystery of Sugar creek,
Newman’s creek and Chippewa creek, whose waters now trend out, but in
preglacial times flowed in. Their mouths were filled with drift to a point
above their source, and the streams of necessity reversed. Newman’s creek,
which now empties into the Tuscarawas near Massillon, is the remains of
an old glacial marsh, with its widest end opening into the Old Mohican, and
it seems plain that this “Shades of Death,’’ as the pioneers called it. marks
the line of a preglacial channel trending north and west. The Chippewa
creek channel is, from a geological and glaciological standpoint, the most
important of all, for it has been surmised that the Old Mohican went through
this channel to Warwick, and then by the Copley marsh to the Cuyahoga,
and thence to Lake Erie. My first objection to this is that I have found
another and better way through which the waters could pass, and my second
objection is based on geological and physical principles. The Chippewa
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Digitized by
Types of Beveled and Serrated Knives found in Wayne County.
About one-half natural size.
Upper Part: Types of Black Flint Arrow Points and Knives.
Lower Part: Fancy Jasper and Chalcedony Artefacts.
About one-half natural size.
Part: Effigy Artefacts representing Buffalo Skulls, Wolf
and Fox Heads, Tadpoles, Fishes Etc.
Lower Part: Jasper Implements with beveled Base.
About one- half natural size.
Upper Part: Flint Digging Implements of Unique Shape.
Lower Part: Jasper Implements of Unusual Forms.
About one-half natural size.
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Google
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
69
creek channel passes over carboniferous conglomerate that contained a vein
of coal, and here is a breach through a fissure in the hills which shows them
to have been cut through, as with pick and shovel, which is not consistent with
their formation, but which is in accord with a law of physics, viz. : Dammed-
up waters will select the point of least resistance in seeking a lower level ; and
here was an immense lake bounded by hard and high hills, and as the lake
was still rising from the melting ice of the glacier's front, there must be
found an outlet, and at last nature furnished it in two notches in the east
hills, the one over Chippewa creek and the other over Newman's creek.
Through these the rising waters rushed, disintegrating and transporting the
obstructing material, until the two channels were formed that now constitute
the west head of the Tuscarawas. In sections 26 and 25 of Chippewa town-
ship coal mines are operated by drift less than a mile apart and the veins are
on the same level, with the creek between them. These veins were certainly
united in preglacial times, and my firm belief is that the waters of the Old
Mohican went from the Orrville lake across the Chippewa channel, receiv-
ing it as a tributary from section 26, through Chippewa Lake to Rocky river,
and thence to the great preglacial river or channel in Lake Erie.
GLACIATION IN WAYNE COUNTY.
In calling attention to the influences of the glaciers — for there were
several stages, each with an advance and retreat — I direct your minds to
the agencies God made use of to beautify and bring more complete “seed time
and harvest" to Ohio's Eden — Wayne county.
I will not speculate on the many theories that have been brought forth to
account for the glaciers' formation and coming; will simply say they are con-
fined to two principal schools, first, that dependent on the procession of the
equinoxes, which is supposed to induce alternates of intense cold and tropical
heat twice in twenty-one thousand years ; second, the annular theory, which
presuppose that the earth, in its earliest history, was surrounded with belts
or rings, as Saturn is now. and that these belts of dense vapor shut out the
direct light of the sun and so induced an even, warm temperature, as in a
hothouse, from pole to pole, allowing the huge mammoth to roam amid giant
palms up to the Arctic circle. That these belts — the distillate of the earth's
furnace — successively came within the earth's attraction and fell to the earth ;
the heaviest first; the carbons that gave nourishment to our coal forests.
Later, and finally, the dense aqueous vapors, which by the earth's rotation
were carried to the poles and fell as snow, to be converted into ice, which we
call a glacier, and which must move through its own weight. My sympathies
combine the two as causes. What we do know positively is that a broad
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
sheet of ice, many thousands of feet thick, formed in the north and moved
south toward the equator, tearing off the tops of the Canadian highlands in
its progress, and carrying a part of its load to Ohio, where, by the sun’s
heat, the ice was melted and its grist deposited in the form of drift and silt and
till. This high mountain of ice, calculated by some to be eleven thousand
feet in thickness, with gravity pulling and some inherent mysterious force
propelling it. crept slowly south, having no respect for the igneous rocks of
Canada, but leveled the ledges of her Laurentian hills, tore the pinnacles to
pieces and took up and incorporated the product as a part and parcel of
itself. As it proceeded south the sun’s heat commenced its disintegration,
and great rivers were formed on its top, over its front and underneath it.
And in these rivers Were rolled the angular blocks of Canadian granite, until
they were rounded into boulders or “nigger heads” and cobblestones, to be
deposited on Wayne county by the million. Nor was this all, for “though
the mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small” ; so the
softer material, as shales, was ground to powder, and the crushed fragments
of quartz, feldspar and hornblend were rolled into pebbles and deposited as
boulders, clays and gravels. After leaving Canada with its load of granite
and gravel, the line of direction of the glacier in its advance was largely
determined, over what is now Lake Erie, by the deep and wide channel of a
preglacial river, called by Newberry, in his geological report, Erie river, a
river which “no man ever saw.”
This river was largely made up of the great volumes of water pouring
from the Old Mohican through Rocky river and through the equally deep
channel of the Cuyahoga, supplemented bv the flood from Black river and
that from the drainage channels of the entire watershed of the south end of
the lake. All these channels are supposed to have converged into one, form-
ing the “Erie river,” and its channel formed a path or mould for the viscous
moving body of ice to follow in its advance, paralleling what is now Lake
Erie. That such a mould will modify the course of the ice, I refer you to
Professor G. F. Wright’s “Ice Age in North America,” page 335. When the
glacier had passed from the soft shale, where it had plowed out a bed for
Lake Erie to lie in, and had shaped and grooved the hard limestone for the
islands near Sandusky, it met in its progress a barrier of massive and re-
sistant limestone and waterlime, capped with firm Waverly, gradually rising
to a height of eight hundred feet above the bottom of the lake, constituting the
southeast Watershed of Lake Erie. This obstacle had to be overcome or com-
promised with, for there is nothing to stop such a moving mass of polar ice
in its advance, save solar heat. Ice is commonly looked upon as a solid, and
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
71
a child has said, “Ice is water asleep,” but ice is not a solid, and if asleep,
it is somnambulistic, and walks in its sleep. Ice is no more a solid than
honey, or lava, for its molecules move upon each other from some mysterious
cause, aside from gravitation, inducing change of form and position, and
here it must have acted against gravity, for the glacier crept on and up the
obstructing mountain, crushed its strata, deepened its ravines, scored its
rocks, as a plane grooves wood, and left its “hall marks” as striae on the hill-
sides. Reaching the rocky summit, it seemed to hesitate before smoothing
the crags of Waverly and dropped part of its load with its heaviest boulders
on the north edge of the hill, and so changed the line of highest hills con-
stituting the continental divide. It then passed on in nearly a direct line
south as far as Newark in Licking county. A moving viscous body, meeting
an obstruction that reacts against gravity, will, by a law of physics, manifest
increased lateral pressure, and bulge, and the bulging will be in the line of
least resistance. Now, at a point northeast of the resisting hills on the lake
front, just where we would expect the reaction against gravity to be greatest,
we find a low col made up of the basin of the Cuyahoga river, four and one-
half miles wide, and the gorge of the Rocky river, three miles wide and only
seven miles of hills between them — fourteen and one-half miles of space and
seven and one-half miles of it open to below the lake’s bottom. And this,
supplemented by the wide mouth of Black river as a lateral, and, centrally,
the channel of the Old Mohican to direct the bulb. Would it be in reason to
suppose that nature would violate her own laws, reject the physical invita-
tion and not send a lobe into the mouths of these hungry rivers? She did
accept the challenge and projected a lobule into the fissure. In proof, I direct
you to the present extension of glacial tongues in Alaska, which generally
follow this law, and to Professor Wright’s “Ice Age in North America,”
pages 174 to 235, demonstrated and recorded striae on the rocks, which on
the hills of Summit county are directed southwest, and on the waverly of
Ashland and Richland counties the scorings are directed southeast, and these
scorings, if projected, would meet in the Old Mohican. The moraines are
also in proof of this, for the terminals are deepest on the sides where the
embarrassing hills modified the laterals, but did not prevent a marked central
moraine for ten miles below Wooster, as well as to the north, and a silting
of the lower reaches to Millersburgh. This valley of the Old Mohican and
Killbuck furnished the groove of direction, with only gently curved variation
from a right line across Medina and Wayne counties to Millersburgh, in
Holmes county, where there is a more marked curve of the valley to the
west, ending at the col near Killbuck Village. The width of this lobule of
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72
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
the glacier extended from Canton, in Stark, to Loudon ville, in Ashland
county, and the lobe was arrested or ended just before reaching the conti-
nental divide of the coal measures. It was stranded as a semicircle, its front
presenting as a bent bow, which a little more than subtends the south front
of Wayne county; the bow string is about thirty miles long from Canton to
Loudonville, while its central projection from this line is about eight miles,
extending to below Millersburgh, with the Killbuck channel as a fixed arrow
in the bent bow. On the outside of this bow from Dundee, in Tuscarawas,
to near Brinkhaven, in Holmes county, where the north and south divide
crosses the Cleveland. Akron & Columbus railroad, the landscape is the
most picturesque in this section of Ohio, made so by the ravines of erosion
created by the rushing waters of the melting ice, and the great masses of
stone broken from the arresting hills and tumbled into the valleys. Near
Dundee, blocks that I have measured are twenty-five by fifteen by six feet
above ground, and how far below no one can tell, and any one who has trav-
eled on the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus railroad from Millersburgh to
Mount Vernon has wondered at the multitude and magnitude of the surface
rocks along the track, especially near Glenmont, many looking like small
houses, while the smaller ones render the ground untillable ; and all these
rocks were torn from the tops of the immediate hills bv the force of the
glacier just as its power of progress was spent, or arrested by the sun’s rays.
This lobe of the glacier seems to have been detached from the main body
just where the coal measures end below Loudonville, for the main mountain
of ice slid on south over the smoother face of the Waverly that skirts the
coal measures to below Newark before it was deflected, a distance of forty
miles. Now, it was this arrested lobe of the glacier that brought the load
of material that changed the entire topography of the hydrographic basin
described in this paper, from Cleveland to Millersburgh and from Massillon
to Mansfield. But particularly in Wayne county was its burden of “Life in
Death’' put down, giving a new physiognomy and a new physiology to the
landscape. The remodeled features of this perspective scene, with its fresh
expression, made the face of this valley a thing of beauty to the eve and a
blessing to agricultural interests. The angular hills and gorge-like valleys
were rounded up into gentle swells and smoothed out into graceful undula-
tions, and the food of the glacial grist was so disposed, digested and fitted for
assimilation that hill and dale rejoiced in verdure unsurpassed, and there
was left as our inheritance as fine a grazing and wheat growing section as
the sun shines on. But our old waterways were obliterated, filled with drift
hundreds of feet above their holding, and new drainage channels must be cre-
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Types of Ungrooved Axe*, or Celts, found in Wayne County. One-
sixth natural size.
Ceremonial Stones made from Black and Banded Slate. About one-half
natural size.
Symbol of the Sun, used in Sun-Worship, showing Points of Compass and
Rays of Light. Made of fine Sandstone. Found in a Mound near
Wooster. About one-half natural size I inch thick. Face rounded.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
73
ated, a few of which, together with their mode of formation, I will attempt to
describe. The Clear fork of the Mohican followed, in part, the old channel
to near Perrysville, but was here obstructed in its course to the Black fork
gorge by drift, the obliterated channel being now distinguished by two small
lakes or kettle holes between the high gravel knolls that turned the waters.
The deflected stream then cut a new channel southeast to the Mohican, its
newness being demonstrated by numerous falls, the most picturesque being
Lyons Falls, where the stream cuts down into the crumbling red sandstone
of the Waverly immediately below the carboniferous conglomerate of an
outlying coal hill, revealing many beautiful casts of fossil. The Black fork
was blocked by moraine material where the Killbuck lobe of the glacier be-
came fixed on the Loudonville hills, and its entire old channel — the Old
Mohican — was filled to an insurmountable height with drift. But the pent-up
waters formed a notch or low col in the hills one mile south of the village of
Loudonville, where the diverted Clear fork rejoined it, and, uniting their
forces, cut a narrow gorge through hills that now stand four hundred and
twenty-five feet above the rock-bottomed and rock-banked Mohican. Here
a mountain of sandstone and shale was cut in two, as you would cut a loaf
of bread. The next new stream starts between Funk and Tylertown, where,
because the old channel in the Big Prairie was walled up by a glacial dam
three hundred feet high, creating the lake noted above, from Custaloga to
Jeromesville, the Muddy and Jerome forks of the Mohican were compelled to
mingle their waters and tear down a low breach in the north and south di-
vide near Fort Tyler into a gorge two hundred feet deep and three miles
long to gain, at Rochester Mill, a preglacial channel coming down from Mo-
hicanville. Another glacial or post-glacial stream was created east of Orr-
ville from the Newman’s creek swamp to the Tuscarawas at Massillon, when
the pent-up waters of the Orrville lake, whose flood plain was high as the
surrounding hills — cut a narrow channel through a fissure in the coal hills and
so reversed a preglacial stream, sending its water up the hill instead of down ;
the immense morainic hills on the south held the waters of the melting glacier
above, until sediment accumulated as high or higher than the gorge, when they
cut through the carboniferous divide to the Tuscarawas at Massillon, the
stre?m bed being fifty feet higher than that of Killbuck.
The Chippewa creek, which was the northern outlet of the great lake
extending from near Orrville to above Chippewa lake in Medina county
and across to near Smithville and Creston, cut a channel through the car-
boniferous conglomerate to a lower level and now forms the west head of
the Tuscarawas river.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
The Old Killbuck, which headed in Wayne township, was diverted by
the moraine at Creston and cut a channel seven miles long to Burbank, from
whence it found an outlet up the channel of the preglacial Black river to the
divide near Overton, and here it cut its way to the present Killbuck.
LAKES AND SWAMPS.
The topography of Wayne county is rendered distinctly picturesque by
the location of its lakes and swamps, and in this, as in all other descriptions,
I include the area bounded by the surveys and acts of the General Assembly
of Ohio in the year 1808. This extended the south line of the county to
the Greenville treaty line, and the west line to include one tier of townships
in Ashland county. This becomes an absolute necessity in presenting a topo-
graphic picture, for the escarpments of Holmes and the rivulets and creeks
that form the heads of the two Mohicans, the Adamic father and mother of
the Big Prairie, are but parts of one great whole.
All the lakes of the county, both open and silted up, are found to have
their centers in preglacial gorges and their lateral margins are the rock banks
of the preglacial streams, covered light or heavy by glacial drift. They are
mostly confined to the eroded channels of the Devonian island and the chan-
nel of the Old Mohican, which runs exactly between the island and rock hills
of the carboniferous. Odel’s and Chippewa lakes are examples of the latter,
while Greenlee's. Marthv’s, Round and Long lakes, in Lake township, Ashland
county, form a chain making a preglacial channel from Mohicanville to near
Lakeville, where it entered the channel of the Old Mohican. Brown’s lake
and Manly’s lake, though the former is very deep and fast closing over with
turf, are simply kettle holes in the moraine \vhere large masses of ice have
become detached from the retreating glacier’s front and so covered with
gravel and sand that the sun could not melt them for centuries, but finally
the sun was supreme — the gravel covering went to the bottom and the lakes
were formed.
Fox lake and Patton's lake are located in the gorge that was drainage
channel for the coal hills of eastern Baughman township ; and there is much
evidence that Fox lake is an immense artesian well. The waters flowing
from the hills into the Tamarack swamp, through the preglacial channel
noted above, into Patton’s lake, and from here, in an undercurrent, to Fox
lake, on the north side of which is found impenetrable morainic material,
and the obstructed water rises through a gravel vent as it would through a
drill hole. This would correspond to the great flowing wells near Sterling.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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those at Fredericksburg and Apple Creek, and especially those along the
Sugar creek in East Union township — in fact, all the flowing wells of the
county are in such channels. The silted-up lakes spoken of above were, to
the pioneers, impenetrable swamps , but many are now drained, and so con-
verted into our most fertile plains, the principal ones being the Big Prairie,
Killbuck Bottoms and the onion fields around Sterling and Creston. For
centuries a rank vegetation grew on them, which falling each year and chem-
ically and physically mixing \vith the silt of the glacier and wash of the hills,
produces an inexhaustible soil, the richest in the county. There were many
morainic islands in the swamp lakes which stood above the waters of even
the spring floods, and bore a harvest of finest forest trees and verdure unsur-
passed.
But the silting up of the lakes was not all; this gift of nature’s God was
smoothly spread over every inch of Wayne county’s surface ; the old channels
of erosion were filled beyond their holdings, in many of them the drift is over
two hundred feet in depth, and near Sterling in the channel of the Old Mo-
hican we find it four hundred and nine feet, in the Big Prairie the silt and
drift and till measures one hundred and seventy-two feet, and Killbuck valley
shows one hundred and eightv-four feet. The angular hills and ragged val-
leys were rounded into graceful swells and undulations; there is not an angu-
lar nor jagged hilltop in the county, but all are domelike in their contour, with
gently declining sides that enter peaceful valleys. The islands in these old
lakes furnished cover for a great variety of wild animals, some fierce, some
foul, but most of them the delight of the hunter and the joy of his wife and
children when he could bring them home, and his wife set them steaming
on the table. The elk and the deer, the bear and the panther, the wildcat
and the wolf, the fox and the raccoon, the porcupine and the rabbit, made
a forest family, with the pheasant and wild turkey, the quail and the wood-
cock, but the birds of prey were also here, the bald eagle and fish hawk, the
buzzard and chicken hawk feasted where they could, and the rattlesnake and
copperhead lay in wait for the unwary. In the waters were found the beaver
and the otter, the mink and the muskrat, and the finest fish for their food,
and over the meadows that skirted the hills and surrounded the swamps the
turf was trod into paths by the buffalo and pierced by the pointed hoof of the
deer. Christopher Gist, in his travels for the Ohio Land Company in 1750 and
1751 and later in 1753, when he accompanied General Washington (then
Major) in an exploring trip through Ohio, mentions large herds of bison,
thirty and forty in a drove, along the Walhonding and Mohican, and my old-
time friend, old Tom Culbertson, had seven skulls of buffalo on his porch
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
near Millbrook, found on the farm of D. Myers, one mile east of Millbrook
village. But When numbers of wild game is considered, we must look to the
ducks and geese and swans that stopped long in their migrations to frolic
in the waters and feast on the bordering vegetation. To say the ducks were
by the million, the geese by the thousand and the swans by the hundred is
telling a truth with much modesty, for at times the sky would be obscured
when they were lighting on or rising from the water. And the low thunder
of their wings on the wind was a wonder, while their quacking was a whole
Fourth of July with Chinese crackers. But the crown for numbers must
be given to the passenger pigeon, whose habit was to feast in the daytime
on the acorns of the "Pocock Woods” and at night go to the alderbushes of
the swamp to sleep (the Pocock woods was a solid body of oak timberland
of one thousand acres, with many associate tracts).
The best way I can illustrate ‘'numbers” will be by relating my experi-
ence in the fall of 1849, when, as a boy, I went with A. Call and J. Allerman,
one night, to get a "mess of pigeons.” We repaired to the alder swamp half
a mile south of Millbrook, Call with a torch and I with a bag. When a rod
in the swamp, we stopped, and while Call held the torch and the tip end of
an alder branch to keep it steady and from flying up, Allerman picked off
the birds, pinched their heads and dropped them into the bag, which I held
open. The birds from five branches filled the bag, a large gunny sack with a
wide mouth. The branches were bent half to the ground by the weight, and
the birds were so blinded and dazed by the light that they could not fly.
Even as late as 1862 a man by name of Schamp, living near "Sharp’s Bridge,”
had a large net, in which he caught immense numbers, enticing the birds to
his place by "stool pigeons,” surrounded with food, then throwing the net
over them. Many a morning I saw him drive into Shreve with a two-horse
wagonbed full to the cover. He would sell them for twenty-five cents a
dozen or a "shilling,” if he could get no more, at Wooster. And yet the
Killbuck swamp was not the only remarkable pigeon roost, for in a paper
by Professor G. F. Wright, of Oberlin, describing a visit to Lodi and the
"Harrisville swamp” (now the great celery farm north of Burbank), and
which is almost a part of Wayne county, for its drainage to the south is into
the Killbuck, says : “This swamp furnished one of the most famous pigeon
roosts in the country, or, indeed, in the world. I trust some of the older
people of Lodi will collect together and write out for the benefit of the world
and future generations the facts concerning this roost. I am told that in early
times, when the pigeons gathered to their resting place toward night, or flew
away in the early morning, the heavens were darkened as by a cloud and the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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noise of their wings resembled that of a strong wind in the treetops of a pine
forest. It is said that after dark one had but to go to the edge of the bushes
and startle the sleeping birds so that they should fly into the air, when he
could kill them in almost any quantities by throwing a stick upwards at ran-
dom. The birds must have been reckoned by the million. A company was
formed in New York City to capture them in immense quantities for the New
York market. * * * It is one of those remarkable phenomena which
will pass out of the knowledge of the world, unless the facts are soon col-
lected and put on record.”
We think this a fitting place to briefly record them. The detail of their
coming and going will never be written, and, if written, could not be under
stood by the generations to come, for the passenger pigeon is gone forever.
A late notice in the papers offers three hundred dollars for a single pair, hop-
ing that in some wild region a pair may still be found. They are like the
bison, the bear, the elk and the deer, and the associate Indian, together with
all the ‘‘wild things of the swamps,” lost eternally to Wayne county, in the
evolution of the white man’s brain, and the contemplation of it prompts the old
inhabitant to say:
“I feel like one who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted.
Whose friends have fled, whose loves are dead.
And all but me departed/’
HUMAN RELICS IN THE DRIFT OF WAYNE COUNTY.
The question whether or not man existed in North America during any
part of the great ice age has during the past few years attracted an unusual
amount of attention and awakened not a little controversy. It is not one
that can lie easily solved. Evidence comes in slowly, and the cases not abso-
lutely conclusive. Indeed, it is this fact that gives ground for the contro-
versy. So many elements of uncertainty gather round the problem that to
eliminate them all from every investigation is at present impossible, and
the conclusion in each case rendered to that degree indeterminate. But
despite this difficulty, we must recollect that in many previous cases anthro-
pologists have been guided by cumulative evidence and it would be in the
highest degree illogical to deny it value in scientific investigation. The ac-
cumulation of a number of cases, each in itself falling short of absolute
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
proof, may yet render the acceptance of their common conclusion more ra-
tional than its rejection, especially in the absence of any rebutting argument
or position. By such methods of reasoning did the glacial theory finally
supplant the diluvial, and by like means has the iceberg hypothesis slowly
yielded to that of the more widely extended sheet of land ice. Indeed, it is
not too much to say that every doctrine in natural science, even the most
widely accepted and firmly believed, rests at bottom on this — that it is more
rational to admit than to deny .
It is, consequently, of great importance that every fact that even seem-
ingly connects man with the ice age in North America should be made
known. That the evidence which it furnishes should be strictly and severely
examined and the exact value ascertained, since only by the multiplication of
such instances can the desired accumulation be obtained. Acting in accord-
ance with the above belief and because I know the artifact to be an honest
find, I present a stone, called the “moccasin last stone,” in connection with a
mass of the cemented gravel in which it was found. The accompanying en-
graving is an exact representation of the stone, and I put it forward for the
honest criticism of anthropologists and archaeologists. It must stand on its
own merits, and will probably commend itself with different degrees of credi-
bility and force to different readers, according to their mental bias and their
perspective view of its different elements.
The facts of the finding are as follows: In the spring of 1894 workmen
were engaged in hauling road material from a bank or hill of glacial gravel
on the bank of the Killbuck. The bank was near the Killbuck bridge on the
Columbus road, one mile southwest of Wooster, Ohio. Running through the
bank, as is not seldom the case in similar material, was a layer of conglomer-
ate formed by the infiltration of carbonate of lime, or iron oxide, or both,
from the upper part of the mass. During the work one of the men, Marion
McCoy, struck his pick into this layer and threw down a small mass, which
in falling broke up and disclosed to the shoveler, Simon Bender, the stone
above mentioned, “a petrified human foot,” as the finder called it. The stone
now, when placed in an Indian moccasin, fits it as accurately as a shoemaker's
last does a boot, hence the name, “moccasin last stone.” A further descrip-
tion of the finding of the stone will be better illustrated and understood by
reading the affidavits of two of the workmen, J. H. Fraim, the director, and
S. Bender, the finder (I have similar affidavits from each of the workmen,
particularly I7. Bierlev ). which I here insert. It will be noticed that they say
the soil and some “gravel had been removed from the top.”
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“State of Ohio, Wayne County, ss :
“Personally appeared before me the undersigned, Simon Bender, who by
me being duly sworn according to law, deposes and says : That about May,
1884, I was loading gravel at the Frederick Bierley gravel bank, just south-
east of Wooster, when some digger (I think Marion McCoy) was bringing
down gravel for me to shovel. The part of the bank from which we were
loading was a wide band where the stones were all stuck together by some
stuff that had run between them, and this layer was about fifteen to seventeen
feet below the surface of the hill and had to be broken apart with a pick.
While the man with the pick (I think McCoy) threw down a small bunch
of this it broke apart by falling and revealed the stone now before me and
which I afterward sold to Dr. Todd. I picked it up and knocked off the
stones that were sticking to it and showed it to the men present, viz. : F.
Bierley, Jacob Kester, Josiah Fraim, Marion McCoy and others. I and some
others thought it an Indian foot turned to stone, but the toes were not there.
I do not know the width of the layer of stone that was stuck together, but I do
know that this stone came from about the middle of it, and that the layer
was fifteen or sixteen feet from the surface of the hill. I took the stone to
one side, but J. Fraim wanted it, and he took it and wrapped it in his coat, laid
it in another place, but I kept an eye on him, and saw where he put it, and
when work was done I went and got and took it home with me where I tried
to further clean it by knocking off all the pebbles that were sticking to it. I
also rubbed it with another stone to smooth off the sticky stuff so it would be
fit to sell, but I could not get it all off and I then took it to Doctor Todd and
sold it to him for twenty-five cents. The stone could not have fallen in from
any other place, for it was in the stones that were stuck together, and no one
iiad it to change it before I sold it to Doctor Todd.
“Simon A. Bender/’
“Sworn to and subscribed before me this 10th day of December, A. D.
1897. Charles C. Jones,
“Deputy Clerk Probate Court, Wayne County. Ohio.”
“State of Ohio, Wayne County, ss :
“Personally appeared before me the undersigned, Josiah H. Fraim, who
being by me first duly sworn according to law, deposes and says, that I was
present at Frederick Bierley’s gravel bank when the stone now before me and
belonging to Doctor J. II. Todd, known as the ‘moccasin last stone/ was
found. We were hauling gravel from the bank to the road in the spring of
1894. The bank is about twenty-three or more feet from where the wagon
stood to the top. We were working from the face at the bottom. There is
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a thick layer running through the bank where all the stones are cemented
firmly together, that is called ‘conglomerate’ by Doctor Todd. This layer
is about eighteen feet from the surface of the hill. While one of the workmen
was throwing down this layer with a pick, he detached a small mass of ce-
mented stones which broke apart when it fell and showed the stone above
mentioned. Some one picked it up and knocked the other stones from it;
we then all looked at it, and Mr. McCoy handed it to me and I wrapped it
in my coat and laid it away to put in my collection, but when I went for it
some one had taken it. I afterwards learned it was Simon Bender. I know
the stone came from the conglomerate layer and could not have fallen from
the surface, for there were still many small pieces of gravel and much cement
sticking to it. As to the depth from the surface at which the stone was
found, I did not measure it, but thought it was eighteen feet, and I have since
looked at the bank and am now confirmed in the opinion. Another point is
that soil and some gravel had been taken from the surface at some previous
time, so now no grass grows on it. The amount of this, if known, would add
to the depth of the stone. Josiah H. Fraim.
“Sworn to and subscribed before me this the 27th day of November,
A. D. 1897. Charles C. Jones,
“Deputy Clerk of the Probate Court, Wayne County, Ohio/'
I personally know this to be true, for over sixty years ago I lived with
my father one-quarter mile from the hill and saw them hauling gravel from
the top, and I know this was continued at intervals to complete the road across
the bottom, this being the only coarse gravel available. How much was
taken from the top is only conjecture, but I measured from the present surface
to the point where the stone was found, and it proved to be seventeen feet.
GEOLOGY OF THE DISTRICT.
The Killbuck flows in one of the preglacial valleys of Wayne county,
which here is three-fourths of a mile wide and is filled to the depth of one
hundred and eighty-four feet by wash from the north. Its general direction
is nearly along the meridian. Near Wooster the Apple creek comes in from
the northeast, and has pushed the Killbuck over to the western side of the
valley, where it is cutting into the shale that forms the walls of its channel
in a few places, though for the most part its banks show only the rounded un-
dulating topography of the glacial hills. Through this gravel overlying the
shale many years ago a wagon road was cut from east to west, crossing the
Killbuck, and since that time gravel has been taken from it, first from the
top, then from the side, for road making, so that a considerable excavation
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Tooth of Mammoth, Weight 4)4 Pounds, found in Muck Swamp near Fiedericlu-
burgh, Wayne County.
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now exists. The top of the bank was originally over forty feet above the
water of the Killbuck, and the gravel excavated shows from twenty-three to
twenty-five feet of nearly perpendicular face. The bed consists of unstratified
material of various sizes, from stones weighing about two pounds down to
sand, and the bed of conglomerate above referred to is about four to six feet
in thickness and traverses the hill horizontally, and is composed of similar
materials. Beyond all question, the hill is one of the morainic mounds depos-
ited by the Killbuck lobe of the glacier during its retreat. And there is not
the slightest ground for supposing that it has been disturbed or in any way
moved since its deposition. The Killbuck has never since the ice age been
at a level measurably higher than it is today. All the above geological facts
were confirmed by the late Professor Claypole, a geologist and archaeologist
of wide reputation, then of Buchtel College, Akron, Ohio, who ten years ago
examined the locality and the stone, pronouncing the stone a genuine prehis-
toric relic, confirmed the above geology and advised the publication of the
finding.
DESCRIPTION OF THE STONE. k i
First look at the picture and know that the material is a moderately fine
sandstone, greenish yellow in color, such as is abundant in the drift of the
region, and calls for no particular notice or comment. The “foot” measures
eight and one-half inches in length by three inches and two and one-half
inches in other directions, and so fairly resembles a last that the finder’s name
for it may well be allowed to pass. But the noteworthy fact, and the one
which justifies the full detail here attempted, is that the stone bears evident
traces of human handkvork and use. At the flat end it shows signs of having
served the purpose of a pestle or muller for grinding or pounding, and over
most of its surface, especially at and about the thinner end, it is covered with
the pits or pick marks usually seen on worked stones of this nature, such as
greenstone axes, celts, etc. Had it been found in usual circumstances, any
collector would unhesitatingly have put it into his cabinet as a common In-
dian or prehistoric pestle, but the depth at which it was found, seventeen feet
from present surface and probably twenty to twenty-four below original sur-
face, and the peculiar details of its discovery, invest it with a new and special
interest in the eyes of the archaeologist.
CONCLUSION.
The following inferences seem to be legitimate from the data already
given and upon others to be mentioned below :
ffi)
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First, the stone is a relic of human workmanship. Its flat end bears all
usual signs of having been used as a muller or pestle such as are common
among the prehistoric remains of the county. Its opposite end is covered
with the pick marks used in stones that have been wrought by human hands.
These pick marks, though most abundant at the rounded end, are visible over
most of the surface except on the flat end, which is smoothed, as is usual in
these pestles.
Second. Being found in the glacial gravel and at the depth mentioned
above, seventeen feet, it is not rational to urge its subsequent introduction
by accident or design. The depth is too great for tree roots or burrowing
animals or cracks ; no trees are growing on the spot, nor is the gravelly soil
of such a nature as to allow deep cracks, while the cement holds the stones
together. A large block, twelve by eighteen inches, that fell with the stone
has lain in my yard since 1894, exposed to the weather, and but few pebbles
have fallen from it.
Third. In further proof of the above inference is the fact that it came
from the bed of conglomerate in the drift, and was so firmly cemented to
other pebbles lying with it that the workmen who found it had trouble in
breaking them from it, and Bender could not scour off the cement with an-
other stone. The position and depth of the conglomerate in the bank being
ascertained, all doubts regarding the position of the stone are necessarily
removed.
Fourth. Further, in consideration of the above facts, it is impossible
to doubt that the stone is of the same age as the other materials of the con-
glomerate; tliat it was buried at the same time; that it has been subject to the
same influences. In fact, that it is an integral part of the conglomerate as
much as the other stones composing the same.
Fifth. One more possible objection must be noticed, as it can be met by
a fact. It may be said that the marks on the stone are recent and have been
made since it was found. Setting aside the distinct and positive testimony
of the finders, as given in their affidavits, already quoted, we may add that
close examination discloses the fact that the stalagmitic encrustation still
remaining fills many of the pick marks in the stone, proving that it is of later
date. Very fortunately, the well-meant, but ill-judged, efforts of the finder
to “clean'’ the specimen was only partly successful, and the concretionary
cement still thickly covers a great part of the surface. It would be much more
satisfactory, no doubt, if the whole mass had remained as it was found, but
we may be glad that the evidence was not entirely destroyed, as has been done
with not a few archaeological relics of very great scientific value when they
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were found, but ruined by too much zeal and too little knowledge in their
finder. On the whole, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that we have
here another indication of human existence in northern Ohio while yet the
ice of the glacial era was present in the state.
Reviewing the evidence herein presented, it seems logical to conclude
that this stone was an implement of domestic use, lost by its owner, and
buried by a glacial stream in the gravel of the Killbuck valley, where it lay
undisturbed until exhumed as above related. At all events, the evidence, as
We have been able to obtain it, is here presented in detail, and it must remain
for archaeologists to weigh it and come to their own conclusions regarding
its final value. If the inferences above given are valid they will before long
be strengthened by others of the same kind. The problem will then reach
its ultimate and complete solution.
OTHER EVIDENCES.
Elsewhere will be found photographs of two stones found in the drift and
now in my possession. The larger one is from a glacial drift hill twenty-five
feet high on its cut face. The hill is similar in every particular to the one
above noted, save that the cemented conglomerate is not so completely strati-
fied. The hill is on the opposite side of the Killbuck, one and one-half miles
higher up the creek, where the Baltimore and Ohio railroad cut through it
when grading the road, and I feel certain that the gravel was never disturbed
before this cut was made. Several years ago, when workmen were taking
out gravel for ballast from the lower face of the hill, this stone was dislodged
and picked up by myself from the tom-down gravels, so I can not exactly
locate its position, but the workmen were taking gravel from a space from
sixteen to twenty feet below the surface of the hill. In form it is a charac-
teristic “turtle back” and is well chipped. Examine it and consider its value.
The second and smaller stone, resembling a rude tomahawk, was found
in a washout in the drift on a hill almost directly opposite the first hill de-
scribed. The top of this hill has for nearly a century been plowed “down
hill” and so its surface greatly lowered. The hill is composed of imper-
fectly stratified gravel and yellow clay. During a spring thaw and flood a
gully some six feet deep was formed in the side of the hill, and from the
yellow clay near the bottom of this gully I picked the stone, the clay firmlv
adhering to it, and I am satisfied that it was taken from undisturbed glacial
clay. That it shows distinct marks of human workmanship, no one seeing
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
it can dispute, and I present it, in connection with the above, as one more
evidence of man's association with the glacier’s retreat in Wayne county,
Ohio.
ANIMAL REMAINS FOUND IN THE MUCK SWAMPS.
The first is a mammoth's tooth, the last molar of the under jaw of the
left side; it weighs four and one-half pounds, although part of the fang is
lost by decay. It is known to be a mammoth's tooth by the cross lines of hard
enamel with softer dentine between. It represents an extinct species of ele-
phant, the “Elephas primigenius," the ancestor of the Indian elephant, and
was covered with a shaggy coat of bristles, long hair and wool. It was con-
temporary with man during and after the glacial period in Europe. The
tooth was found in the filled-up glacial lake on the Brownfield farm, northeast
of Fredericksburgh, Ohio. The lake is in an old preglacial channel and in its
center is an old morainic island, on which was a late Indian village, furnishing
many relics. In a spring freshet the north branch of Salt creek washed into
this swamp, tearing down the muck and with it the tooth which the engrav-
ing represents. It was found when the water subsided by Mr. John Living-
ston, who brought it to me. The tooth was found only seven miles from the
swamp (of similar character) in which was found the immense skeleton of
the giant sloth — megalonyx Jeffersonii — by my old friend, Mr. Abraham Dru-
shell, and which is now placed in Orton Hall of the Ohio State University,
the only such skeleton mounted in the world.
The next specimen was found when driving a sewer through a glacial
kame in front of my house in Wooster, Ohio. The specimen was found fif-
teen feet down from the original surface of the soil, lying between layers of
blue boulders, clay and yellow Cleveland clay. It is five and one-half inches
long and one and one-quarter inches in its greatest diameter, with a peculiar
articulation at its distal end, such as is found in the cat tribe, where the claw
rolls on the bone, and can be sheathed. I regard it as the last phalynx of the
central toe of the extinct saber-toothed lion. It can not be represented on
paper, but I note it here because the lion was contemporary with the mam-
moth and man in Europe, and may have been in America in glacial time, and
I make this point for Wayne county, Ohio — that when such animals could
live, man could live.
The next find is the shark's teeth, represented in the engraving. The
teeth are from the man-eating shark (genus Carcharinus), which lived in a
warm sea and grew to fifteen to twenty-five feet in length. The large tooth,
associated with one on the card from South Carolina, was found in the muck
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Miscellaneous Artefacts found in Wayne County.
natural size.
One-sixth
Types of Ungrooved Axes, or Celts, found in Wayne Cou..l j .
One-sixth natural size.
Sharks' Teeth, found in the Muck Swamps of Wayne County. About two-thirds natural size.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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of Killbuck bottoms, below the fair grounds. The others were found when
draining a muck swamp in a preglacial gorge down the head of the Cincin-
nati incline on section 32, Milton township. They were not the only-
teeth recovered, for the family kept some, and I had two stolen from me.
In addition, I have a number of shark’s teeth, but of another species, recov-
ered from the Newman’s creek swamp near Orrville. How sharks got here
is only surmise, but imagination whispers to me that they were stranded in
the fissures of the hills, from the warm sea that surrounded the head of the
island when the land rose and the sea gave place to a carboniferous forest.
Since writing the above, I had a row of types of the small teeth found in
Newman’s creek swamp added to the plate.
THE INDIANS OF WAYNE COUNTY.
The legends and traditions handed down from the remote ancestors of
the Leni Lenape or Delawares tells us that many centuries ago the country
from the “Nama-esi Sipu” — the Mississippi river — to the Alligewi Sipu — the
Allegheny river — which then included the Ohio, was occupied by a people
called Allegewi, and to these people we are indebted for the names Alleghany
mountains and Allegheny river. The Allegewi were a tall and strong race,
the Leni Lenape describing many of them as giants: but they were peaceful
and inclined to agriculture. Still, they had many fortified towns, with ditch
and embankment, surmounted with palisades. But’ their quiet was broken
and the Allegewi migrated to the far south, giving place to the Cat nation,
who held and occupied the country from the Scioto river to Lake Erie, to
which they gave name. The Leni Lenape had passed on to the Susquehanna
and the Delaware river, and here received the name Delaware, after Lord
De la Ware, “a brave and good man.” The Eries were a peaceful people, and
ever a neutral nation in the wars, but this neutrality furnished an excuse
to the intriguing and fiercely bloodthirsty Iroquois (Five Nations) for a war
of extermination, and being supplied with guns and knives and tomahawks
of steel by the Dutch of New York, they began the war of annihilation.
The Eries, against such superior weapons, could do nothing — the nation was
destroyed. That the Dutch were the devils in peace clothing that incited
the Iroquois to deeds of violence and rapine and murder so that they (the
Dutch) could secure the fertile lands of the vanquished is simply a matter
of history (see Heckewilder, Zersberger and Loskeil).
The destruction of the nation was complete — most of the unfortunates
murdered by the bullets and bayonets and steel tomahawks supplied by the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
smiling Dutch, many of the prisoners were tortured until the Great Spirit
anesthetized to fainting, when they were burned. A few were adopted by
the more humane of the Iroquois and a few more escaped across the lake to
Detroit from their last stand at their stronghold on Put-in-Bay Island in
Lake Erie, the lake of their naming and loving. Another part, probably
from this county and the Mohican valley, fled down the Muskingum and
Scioto to the Ohio, and thence to St. Louis, and from there by degrees up
the Missouri, establishing many towns and finally settling as Mandans on a
beautiful and romantic spot on the north Missouri near Bismarck, North
Dakota. Here they lived unmolested and happy for a time, but finally the
smallpox within their fortified town of two thousand souls and the Sioux
watching without, so they could not even bury their dead, brought their
entire destruction.
So you see that the Indians the whites found here when they invaded
the country were not native to the soil. The tribes then inhabiting Wayne
county were the Delawares, the Mohicans and a few Mingoes, all of whom
came here from the far east as the white man encroached upon them from the
sea. When they came into Ohio they knew nothing, scarcely by tradition,
of the mounds and relics in stone left here by their ancestors, and this is why
we separate the Indian from the “Mound Builder.” But as children they
had been taught in a new school, of new things, by new teachers. They had
learned to fight with new weapons and had been taught the practical meaning
of treachery and vengeance ; in place of tomahawks of granite and arrowheads
of flint, they had guns and knives and tomahawks of steel for defense and
offense. Their whole nature and manhood, from environment and association
with the white man. had been warped from the original; they had been
harassed by the Iroquois, cheated by the Dutch, filled with whisky by the
English, and scourged from their hunting grounds by the psalm-singing
Puritans, and driven with disgrace under the sobriquet of women into the Ohio
country. What wonder they were called “savages,” and what greater won-
der that after such massacres, as unprovoked as was done with the one hun-
dred defenseless Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten, and the thirteen toma-
hawked in their sleep on the site of the Catholic church in our own city, that
they did not retaliate more than by burning Colonel Crawford. Colonel
Crawford would never have been burned by Captain Pipe, save for the
Gnadenhutten infamy, nor the Great Spirit-respecting, white-man-loving, hos-
pitable gentleman Logan been transformed into a revengeful and merciless
“savage” had not Captain Cresap been a fiend. Such acts, with many others
recorded in history, would blur the fair face of nature and make hell shud-
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deringly ashamed. It must not, however, be thought that I want to make
the Indian an angelic or even a civilized character, but, leaving out the Iro-
quois and the Sioux, though we must relegate the North American Indian to
the barbarian stage of human evolution — the savage being a retrogression —
yet as nations or tribes they had many virtues and many noble, honorable,
executive chiefs, with a true desire for peace, purity and advancement. The
principal chiefs connected with Wayne county history Were Killbuck, Beaver
Hat, Custaloga, White Eyes, Half King, Mohican John and Captain Pipe.
Want of room prevents any detailed history of these chiefs. A few notes
must suffice. Captain Pipe (Hobacan in Indian) belonged to the Wolf tribe
of the Delawares. He was born on the Susquehanna in 1740, and in 1758
located on the Tuscarawas. After the treaty of 1795 he came with other
Delawares to near Mohican John's town, near Jeromeville, Ashland county.
I have many times looked over the remains of Pipe’s cabin, when fishing
in the ‘‘Old Town run,” and well remember when in 1841 a deputation of
Delawares came to see if the graves of their ancestors had been desecrated.
I then had seven skulls and many long bones of “dead Injuns” for a play-
house in the yard ; the bones had been exhumed when digging a mill
race. The red men called me to the gate and asked for “man-house.” I ran
for grandfather, the Rev. Elijah Yocum, whom they asked if they could bury
the bones. He made for them a large box, when they gathered all other
bones, and I saw them bury them with many curious signs.
Mohican John, with his tribe, was driven from Connecticut and Rhode
Island. He came to Ohio in 1755 and first located at Tullihas, on the Big
Mohican, where Owl creek enters. He removed to the “Old Town” home
in 1795, and left about 1814. The trail from Tallehas followed the Mohican
to the mouth of Killbuck, then up this to “Big Spring,” the Wayne county
home of Chief Killbuck, thence to the mouth of Crawford’s run, up this to the
Maize Mill, from whence the trail is followed by wagon road to Shreve, then
to Odel’s lake, and up the Mohican to Mohican John's town, on the “Old
Town run” — Chief Beaver Hat had his winter wigwam near the Wooster
cemetery, and in summer an “apple orchard” on the Apple creek. Chief
Custaloga lived near Big Prairie, and the station on the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne
& Chicago railroad depot is named for him.
Captain Pipe. Killbuck (Gelelemand) and White Eyes were delegates
to the great conference at Fort Pitt. Chief Killbuck’s chief home was at
Tullihas, but he had a cabin on the Thomas Douty farm, near the Big Spring,
the great fishing place of the Indians and of the early inhabitants. Killbuck
had two sons, one of whom was very dissipated and threw opprobrium on his
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father. Captain White Eyes lived in White Eyes township, Coshocton
county. He and Killbuck had strong desires that their nation might become
a civilized people, but he died young, of smallpox, in 1778. Killbuck died
near the mouth of the Killbuck in 1810, at the advanced age of eighty years.
Excepting probably Captain Pipe, who was soured in old age, all these men
were ambitious to protect their people, and they were all and always honor-
able, peaceful men, and virtuous beyond their age. They were above the
savage and were superior to all white barbarians. They were “nature's
noblemen," with the forest for a home, the groves in the meadows were their
temples and council places, and contemplation compels one to repeat :
“Lo ! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds and hears Him in the wind.
His soul, proud, science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way ;
Yet simple nature to his hope has given
Beyond the cloud-topped hills an humbler heaven.
And thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company."
FORTIFICATIONS AND ENCLOSURES.
The remains of fortifications or enclosures for observation and protec-
tion are very numerous in Wayne county, particularly in the vicinity of
Wooster, which seems to have been a commercial center for the aborigine
as well as in our twentieth century civilization. Each and every one of the sur-
rounding hills is crowned with an enclosure commonly called a “fort." The
hills outstand as headlands overlooking the valleys of Apple creek and Kill-
buck and from any of these points observation and communication could be
secured with other like crowned hills near Shreve and Funk, and Jeromes-
ville and on to Ashland, Hayesville, Mansfield, Millersburgh. The con-
struction of the walls of the enclosures was very similar on all the hills, viz. :
a trench and embankment, surrounded with palisades. The largest en-
closure, containing between thirty and fifty acres, was situated on Madison
hill, the first location of the county seat, now the Experiment Station farm
and Wooster cemetery. This had more the character of a “fort" than many
others, for the north wall was partly built of stone, the construction being
distinctly recognizable forty years ago, where the Moorland road cut
through the wall, and the west boundary can even now be traced from .the
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First Mill erected by a White Man in Wayne County. Made from a Huge
Boulder, end located on the Muddy Fork, about 1809. Sculptured Indian Head, made of Tran*.
lucent Flint. Finely specialized by
chipping. About twice natural size.
Found by Author near Wooster.
Pre- or Inter-Glacial Pestle, the so-called ' 'Moccasin Last”, found in Undisturbed Glacial Gravel 17 feet below the Surface.
Much reduced — bare shows the gravel.
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east line of Wooster’s new cemetery to near the north line of the Catholic
cemetery. A mound was on the southeast angle above Experimental build-
ings.
The next largest was on the Joe Eicher farm, west of Wooster, where
the shale bank of the Clear creek — some twenty-five feet high — formed the
north side, and from a point on this creek near the wagon road an embank-
ment was carried around the hills in a semi-circle to a point some forty rods
up the creek, including five to seven acres. Twenty years ago the embank-
ment was still three feet high, although the ground had been farmed for sixty
years. This site furnished me many fine relics.
One and a half miles up Killbuck from this on the late Rose Ann Eicher
farm, just below the Big Springs, is a beautiful oval enclosure, the bank of
which is still complete and four feet high, the point of the egg extending
almost to the bank of the Killbuck, which is here twenty feet high with a
gully to the south, affording protection from marauders coming up or down
the stream, which was then a boating highway from the Muskingum up
to the portage beween Burbank and Lodi on the Black river. The hill
above the springs rises two hundred feet to a plateau, from which the Kill-
buck river could be scanned for many miles. The enclosure is still in the
native woods and is undisturbed and the tract, including enclosure, springs,
plateau and meadow adjoining the creek, should be preserved for a park,
for, in the writer’s opinion, it is the finest site for health and recreation in
the county of Wayne or even the state of Ohio.
The next distinguished hill top is directly across the Killbuck valley
from the above described and is popularly known as Fort Hill. It is sit-
uated on a promontory in the angle formed by the junction of Little and
Big Killbuck. The bluff is six hundred feet in long diameter and one hun-
dred and fifty in the short, top surface. The sides are thirty-five feet high
from the roadbed on either side. On the northwest it is nearly cut from the
mainland by a ravine, only a narrow neck connecting, which was guarded
bv a ditch and bank, probably palisaded. On the top is a circle about one
hundred by eighty feet and there are also two mounds, each twenty-five
to thirty feet in diameter and two to three feet high. There is an available
spring on the west side and I am convinced that here was erected (or
selected) a refuge and defense “fort.” My opinion is strengthened by the
fact of its commanding a long and wide view of the Killbuck valley, but
primarily by the fact that out from its front at the distance an arrow would
fly I have picked up in the last ten years over fifty warrior darts, the small
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triangular ones, so fashioned that if once driven into a body and the arrow
shaft pulled out, the dart or point would remain and induce suppuration. Or
may not the point have been poisoned ?
The remains of an enclosure are still recognizable on the Bechtel hill
near the Spring. This hill overlooks the fair grounds and the valley and
across the Christmas run on a similar spur of hill is another well-marked
enclosure, just above a fine spring.
There was a large enclosure on the hill southwest of Wooster that
included twenty acres. It was situated between the two Killbuck bridges
and was peculiar in being double terraced on the stream side of the hill — one
trench and embankment low on the hill and in the shale where the implements
were of very old type, and about sixty feet above a parallel embankment that
was probably palisaded. Here implements were of jasper and finely serrated
on both sides. There was a fine spring in the enclosure and a deep ravine on
the north side. The traces are now almost obliterated by plowing down hill,
but sixty-five years ago when I first saw and played on the terraces it was
plainly marked. A part was then in woods. A large enclosure was noticed
on Bald hill, above Shreve. where Doctor Pocock opened many single graves.
This faced one across the valley, but I can describe no more.
•
MOUNDS.
The mounds of Wayne county are many, but small, ranging from fifteen
to fifty feet in diameter by two to six feet in height. A few fine gorgets,
ceremonial stones and totems have been found in them, with arrow and spear
heads. Most of them were opened years ago and no record kept, as the open-
ers were simply relic hunters. The finest, to my personal knowledge, was
opened on the bank of the Muddy fork near New Pittsburgh. There was
found but one skeleton, on the breast of which was a large slate pendant,
and around the thorax were laid thirty-five well worked leaf-shaped imple-
ments, four and one-half inches long by one and one-half wide at center,
and one fine stemmed spear head six inches long, while at the hands lay two
elegant, deep-grooved axes, with pointed poles, one of quartz and the other
a light blue stone, the texture not determined. Both are perfect: I have all
in cabinet.
There is a large mound on the Bob Snyder farm, a half mile up the hill
from Kanke Station that is unique in construction and history. The hill
top on which it is located commands the most extensive and, the writer thinks.
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the finest pastoral view in Wayne county. The mound is fifty feet in diam-
eter and was about nine feet high. It is in an unbroken woodland and covered
with nature's forest trees, the roots of which greatly embarrassed digging and
disturbed the strata. The bottom is formed like a low rimmed saucer, made
of hard puddled clay, covered with three inches of sand, and scattered over
this is a layer of charcoal, burned or charred bones and pieces of splintered
flint; over this is another layer of puddled clay, covered with sand, and on
this is more charcoal, incinerated bones and implements, broken up as by fire.
Here the original mound, or place for cremation purposes, seems to have
been completed or abandoned, for above this — about three feet high — comes
a two-foot covering of yellow clay, in which I found — in the trench, two feet
wide, which I drove from periphery to center — two bundles of “long bones’’
and some loose bones, but no skulls. The long bones seemed to have been
tied together, or thrown in piles as in communal burials and were so infil-
trated with and cemented together by the tough clay, that 1 took them out
entire and still have them as well as the charcoal, sand and contents from the
bottom of the mound. I11 places the long bones had entirely decomposed in
the clay, leaving only a hole — or cast — with a dark line to tell of the matrix.
But this is not all of the mound, for over all of this had been heaped four
or five feet of earth from the immediate surroundings, which completed a
conical mound from the truncated ones of past ages. The late Dr. D. Pocock,
of Shreve, opened this from the top in 1870, and secured two skeletons, two
gorgets and a number of other relics. Of course the top layer represented
late or intrusive burials, but the mound taken as a whole would indicate three
different ages, with three distinct modes of interment.
IMPLEMENTS AND ARTIFACTS OF THE ABORIGINES.
With the word “savage” we instinctively couple the idea that the “flints”
we find in the field are “arrow and spear heads,” and all made to be used in
the killing of something, man or bird or beast. But this is farthest from the
truth, for not one chipped flint or pecked stone in twenty was specialized for
war or the chase.
The great mass of stone relics found are implements of husbandry or
for domestic use. The first lesson the aborigine had to learn was how to live,
not how to fight, for that was a luxury to be added later. To live, he must
have food for his stomach and clothes for his body and a bed to lie on. His
first need was a knife, and this was supplied in the flake of a flint, the first
artifact of man's ingenuity to supply a domestic want; with it the aborigine
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skinned his captured deer, fashioned its hide into clothing and bed quilts, cut
up its carcass, shaped his defense club, and did so many other things with it,
that I am prompted to ask you “What do you do with a knife?" In de-
termining the use of the implements of primitive man, we must be as familiar
with the management of thought as a painter is in the manipulation of colors;
we can take cognizance of an object only in so far as we can come into rela-
tion with it, and in the contemplation of Indian implements we cannot place
ourselves in such complete association, for environment and the needs of the
user, together with the mental status of the maker, must be supplied. This
can only be done by considering what is positively known of uses by existing
barbarians, or those yet in the stone age, or by tradition, or finally by the
imagination.
So all positive knowledge is in a chaotic state, save that which has been
or is gained by field work and collecting which associates the implement with
its location. Its geologic horizon determining its age; its connection with a
mound showing it to be mortuary ; its association with a fortification proves
defensive war; while if rescued from an enclosure we reckon it the local
fauna of a village site.
So in studying the character and mode of manufacture of primitive
man's relics you must try to put yourself in his place , as you should with
Moses and his tablets of stone.
For these, and many other reasons, I have coupled Wayne county
(where most of my thirty thousand specimens were collected — over three
thousand with my own hand) with types of implements, for comparison and
unison, — from the streams of adjacent counties representing the seven heads
of the Muskingum river, viz. : the four forks of the Mohican, Killbuck, Chip-
pewa creek and Sugar creek. In all of these the writer has personally noted
the horizon of village sites, mounds and enclosures, and finds that both banks
of the Killbuck present almost continuous village sites. At every spring that
is surmounted by a knoll is found the chips or flakes and “wasters" that pro-
claim a work shop, and along many of the smaller streams the same evidences
were found.
There are three principle types of relics. The first is the chipped or
flaked implement of flint. Flint breaks when struck or firm pressed with a
conchoidal — like a watch crystal — fracture, producing a sharp edge to core
or implement as well as to the flake and this flake can be used as a knife, or if
a larger spall, even as an ax. The second is the pecked and polished imple-
ment— polished at least at the cutting edge, such as the grooved axes, celts,
tomahawks made of granite, greenstone, diabase, quartzite and argelite.
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These must be first pecked into shape with a harder stone and then polished.
The third comprises the class of beautiful souvenirs done in slate; the gor-
gets, done in all imaginable artistic forms, to be worn on the breast as marks
of distinction, or carried in any manner fancy, fashion, or cast would dictate,
have been found in the county in great numbers.
The “bird stones,’* over which the marriageable maiden coiled and dressed
her hair, are less numerous, but in the writers cabinet there are half a dozen;
but they do not all represent birds nor “saddles," for one has the head of a
mountain lion and another the head and tail of a beaver, so I reckon they
were totems as well as decorations.
The totems, of which several are represented, are usually in banded state
and finely specialized and are evidently the insignia of a tribe. The tubes
may be either pipes or “cupping tubes” used in legitimate medication or the
necromancer’s winch by which he catches the evil spirits infesting the ptient
and sucks them through the skin, usually depositing a mass of foul tobacco on
the reddened place, which he exhibits as the disintegrated spirit.
The butterfly stones are beautiful, as may be seen in the illustration. In
addition to these, there are amulets, pendants, beads, ear rings (some of stone,
averaging two and three ounces), hair pins and perforated pieces without
number that were certainly made for a purpose and either used at religious
ceremonials, or in the dance, or to ward off evil spirits or be worn as dec-
orations. But you must give wild wings to your imagination and let fancy
carry you to the wild man’s home in the woods if you would learn all their
uses and meanings.
VILLAGE SITES.
The most remarkable village site in Wayne county is on the old Mc-
Clelland farm in the angle formed by the union of Crawford’s creek with the
Killbuck near the coal chute. Here the writer has found three village sites
superimposed one above the other. In the oldest you find implements of the
rudest construction, made from the crudest material, as pebbles from the
brook and cherty limestone from the Moorland hill and most of the chipped
relics deeply patined. The next class are better specialized and the flint
mostly from the quarries near Coshocton. The top artifacts show great art in
the pattern and dexterity in the artisan, while finer flint is used, much being
the beautiful chalcedony from Flint Ridge and another, black or blue grey
that works elegantly : but the quarry has not yet been located. I have over
one thousand specimens from this site and among them is a cache of fifty
beautiful leaf shaped artifacts, made from clear white flint, with a jasper
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
lustre. On the headland above this terrace is the remains of an enclosure and
on the apex a small mound, from the base of which I took the emblem of
Sun Worship, representing the rising sun and the four points of the compass.
This mound had been opened by John Rahm and many relics taken from the
top, showing an intrusive burial.
An unique village site was found on the Meier farm, section 2, Franklin
township, on the gravel kames surrounding an old silted-up lake. Here
many of the implements were made in effigy, both flora and fauna repre-
sented, as buffalo skulls, head and ears of the wolf, fish, tadpoles, birds
in flight, leaves of the trees, etc., brooches and beads in jasper together with
digging implements of elegant pattern and utility.
But along with these were many crude knives and darts, some of which
had been rechipped and showed deep patterning, evidently the remains of an
old and vanished race whose relics were rejuvenated and utilized.
The last village site I will note is on the terraced bank of the Apple
creek, southeast section, Wooster township. Here was the beautiful sum-
mer home of Beaver Hat, his Apple Chauquecake (Apple Orchard). Here
a thousand fine relics were found of flint and slate and stone, unsurpassed if
equaled in the state. Among them the rare and beautiful Indian head, illu-
strated imperfectly herein. The sculpture is done by chipping so fine that a
glass has to be used to see it. The effigy shows the stately pose of the Indian,
high cheek bones, partly shaven head and the two long locks of black hair
parted and carried over the bared breast. So perfect is it that an eminent
archaeologist said on seeing it, “had the maker been possessed of tools he
would have been a Michael Angelo.,, The form is enlarged, which mars its
fineness.
GENERAL RELIQUIA.
The reliquia of Wayne county I think was equal in amount to that of any
county in the state, and for quality of material, elegance of workmanship, va-
riety of expression and artistic design, was superior to most (excepting of
course the effigy pipes and copper ornaments of the mound builders of south-
ern Ohio), but many of the early surface finds when only the finest were
picked and preserved by the pioneers were destroyed mostly by fire. Doctor
Pocock's collection at Shreve, consisting of many thousand relics, and the
collection gathered by President Taylor for Wooster University, all went to
flinders when the buildings went up in smoke, while the large collection of
Mr. Reed, of Dalton, was removed from the county. But with all this. I still
have thirty thousand perfect specimens, including over fifty different patterns
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95
of grooved axes and hatchets (celts), and every known form of pestle known
to Ohio; pipes of slate, sandstone and baked clay with others known as moni-
tor and effigy; bird bunts, to stun, not penetrate; arrow points for larger
game, finely specialized and long buffalo darts ; warrior darts, to poison or
fester the flesh; flints, with polished bases; spear heads of every pattern,
knives, scrapers, hide dressers, bark peelers, beads, ear rings and brooches,
fish hooks in flint, crochet hooks for net making and net sinkers; piercers and
needles with polished slate pieces without number, including totems and re-
ligious ceremonials.
But to describe them here without illustration is impossible. I can only
refer you to Squire and Davis, who opened the mounds of Ohio at an early
date, and ask you to read and study the illustrations jn Gerard Fowke's re-
markable book, the “Archeological History of Ohio/’
POTTERY.
The creation of utensils for domestic use bv moulding clay and then
burning it was one of the first expressions of man’s inventive power. The
early forms were crude : A straw basket was woven and the moist clay, mixed
with pounded shells, was pressed into the meshes from the inside, and the
semblance of a pot placed in the sun to bake.
In the world’s development, life had been given to man. but the struggle
to keep it was hard and required all his energies. Life had been given to the
troglodyte, but life had also been given to the saber-toothed tiger, the serpent,
and the mammoth and they too loved and fought for life. The man must
overcome them or perish. Intellectual comparison was yet in abeyance, the
troglodyte’s brain was yet boggy, and the time of waiting was long before
God said. “Let life and thought together meet and mingle and man be a rea-
soning, as well as a living soul.” But it came at last, and marked the first
great crisis in the troglodyte’s evolution — the age, or stage of inventive rea-
soning. Now he could lay traps, create implements of aggression, secure
food, protect his family, and rest secure in his cave at night.
Art necessitates leisure and leisure only comes after the body is well
clothed and the stomach filled to satiety ; so the troglodyte was no artist, all his
implements were of the crudest, and the rudest; but when reason was added
to instinct and the tongues of the glacier had receded and left flower gardens
in their wake, as they now’ do in Alaska, and the fiercer animals gave way to
the reindeer, the bear and the buffalo, then his hours were more peaceful and
not all occupied in securing food and shelter. He had leisure to contemplate
and decorate.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
After this brain storm that cleared his perception and added purpose to
his conception, primitive man's first thought was to better and beautify his
game-killing implements, and, second, to create more useful and artistic
furnishings for his household. Hides must be tanned to preserve and render
them supple, and the rude and fragile drinking and cooking utensils must be
made more durable and attractive, and in this inspiration is to be found the
nucleus of pottery making and of pottery decoration.
The remains of primitive pottery in Wayne county are very meager in
comparison with those of southern Ohio and are mostly confined to separate
fragments or pot sherds, and these seem to be largely mortuary, as but few
fragments are found on the surface or in the kitchen refuse.
The writer knows of but one complete vessel found in the county. This
was encountered while workmen were grading a hill of undisturbed glacial
gravel south of Wooster for an addition to the Wooster cemetery. The relic
was about three feet from the surface when struck and shattered by the
plough. It was a large and well formed bowl with unique decorations on
the sides and an artistically fashioned rim ; it was shaped like an old-fashioned
boiling pot, with bulging sides. The depth was nine inches, the diameter at
bulge fifteen inches and at the rim twelve inches. The bottom was very thin,
one-fourth inch, but very compact, while the rim showed a band one-half
inch thick and one inch wide around the top and this embellished and strength-
ened by graceful elevations at intervals. In the bowl was only a few hand-
fuls of dark oily mould, and the writer's opinion is that the vessel was a mor-
tuary bowl.
BURIALS.
Except the cemeteries of the late, white contaminated Indians and in-
trusive burials in mounds, I have found but two sepulchres worthy of record.
The first is a “stone grave" on the farm of the late John Culbertson. It is
located on a terrace of the Little Killbuck just opposite “Fort Hill," above
described. It was made of shale flagging, from the brook. A layer of slabs
for bottom, sides and top; was about three feet deep, but the skeleton was so
decayed that nothing was left but a line of dark mould and a few undistin-
guishable bones that went to powder when exposed to the air.
The second was found on a promontory of shale, capped by forty feet of
glacial gravel abutting on the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago railroad
in section 29, Wooster township, and above the terrace on which the three-
ply village site is located. Workmen, in cutting a new road through the hill,
came across a unique grave. As soon as discovered, the writer was sent for
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ERRATA.
On page 57, line 37, “Christian” should read “Christmas.”
On page 66, lines 37 and 38, “one thousand eight hundred and eighty-five” should
read “one hundred and eighty-five.”
On page 67, line 1, “one thousand eight hundred and eighty-five” should read “one
hundred and eighty-five.”
On page 74, line 24, “making” should read “marking.”
On page 79, line 4, “1884” should read “1894.”
On page 92, line 30, “is found” should read “are found.” •
.On page 95, line 1, “every known form” should read “every form.”
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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and found a skeleton in a sitting position , facing the south; the knees were
drawn up and arms extended over them or to the side. The grave was elab-
orately prepared, the bottom being seven feet from the surface. The en-
closure resembled a large old-fashioned store box, three by four by three feet
in size. The sides, back and front were formed of a double thickness of heavy
bark, with bottom and top of split puncheon, three and four inches thick and
six to ten inches wide. At the right hand of the pelvis was the half of a
huge mussel shell, four by seven inches, in which was two ounces of red paint,
and on the left was a duplicate shell containing white paint. Bark and
puncheon, shells and skeleton went to pieces when exposed to the air, only the
paint remaining. Burials of this kind are very rare. Gerard Fowke, the
most experienced archaeologist and field worker in Ohio, says in his “Archaeo-
logical History of Ohio:” “I have never found a skeleton which had been
placed in a sitting posture,” yet I have found one other in a similar gravel hill
near Captain Pipe's cabin at old Jerome Town. The prime fact in these
burials was that the skeletons were without their skulls, the heads had evi-
dently been removed before burial; whether to retain the vigor of the chief,
or other noted personage, — as the medicine man — to the tribe, or on account
of the superstition that the spirit of the dead should not be given to the worms,
is all conjecture — exercise your imagination.
7)
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CHAPTER IV.
TOPOGRAPHY AND GENERAL FEATURES.
[For the facts herein stated, the author of this \vork is indebted to a
like article written prior to 1877 by Hon. John P. Jeffries, of Wooster, hence
it comes with almost undisputed authority.]
Wayne county, located on the southern declivity of the dividing ridge
intervening between the northern lakes and the Ohio river, has been in all
ages past the theatre of marked changes prior, as well as subsequent, to the
time of the elevation of the Alleghanies and the formation of the northern
lakes. The whole face of the country shows the action of the flowing water,
and that the entire surface many centuries ago was covered by a deep sea,
and wrought upon by its turbulent action, is plainly manifested upon the
elevations in the valleys and the alluvial plains.
The territory of Wayne county is a part of that great topographical dis-
trict reaching from the lakes to the gulf of Mexico, and from the Alleghany
to the Rocky mountains. The northern limits of this county, extending
within a few miles of the southern rim of the Lake Erie basin, is the water-
shed, or divide between the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. The spill, or
summit level, is at Summit Lake, near the city of Akron, in Summit county,
and is three hundred and ninety-five feet above Lake Erie, while the summit
dividing the wraters of the Black river and the Killbuck, north of Bridgeport,
near Lodi, Medina county, is at an altitude of three hundred and eighty-two
feet above the lake level. The highest land in Wayne county is in the vicinity
of Doylestown, Chippewa township, which is four hundred and thirty feet
above Lake Erie and one thousand forty-tw'o feet above the Atlantic ocean.
The main portion of Wayne county — indeed, nearly every part of it —
is covered with drift, and the value and nature of the soil is regulated by
the character of the drift spread over the surface, varying in depth from
ten to seventy or eighty feet in vertical thickness, the average drift deposit
being about twenty-five feet.
The mass of soil is generally composed of sand, gravel, clay and loam,
though in some portions the clay predominates, as in the beech district in
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99
the northern part of the county; but mixed with these leading constituents
in proper proportions are those essentials which make the soil productive
and produce the abundant crops for which this county is so noted, such as
silica, lime, magnesia, alumnia, iron, phosphorus and soda. The soil is not,
as some suppose, limited to a few inches of surface, but is as deep as the
drift itself, though, properly speaking, the soil, so called by the farmers, is
confined to a few inches in depth from the surface.
The whole surface of Wayne county contains 342,805 acres, the area
of which, by the territory of the several townships, is as follows: Paint,
15,552; Sugarcreek, 22,984; Baughman, 22,659; Chippewa, 22,443; Green,
22,456; Milton, 22,664; East Union, 22,441; Saltcreek, 14,871; Franklin,
23>oo5; Wooster, 14,591 ; Wayne, 23,084; Canaan, 23,194; Congress, 23,007;
Chester, 26,283; Clinton, 17,211; Plain, 26,359.
The marshes of the county are chiefly confined to Wooster, Plain, Frank-
lin, Clinton, Sugarcreek and Baughman townships.
The early settlers of this county found it densely wooded, except the
marshy districts and the plain of lands of Wooster, Chester, Plain and Clinton
townships. The Plains (then termed the Glades upon the presumption, from
appearance, that they were of the character of glade lands in Pennsylvania,
poor and worthless) turned out to be the most productive lands of the county.
When first visited by white men they were barrens, thickly wooded with
low, bushy oak, from three to four feet high, which gave evidence of being
the product of an impoverished soil, and the early settlers, being of this
opinion, shunned these glades, preferring rather to clear away the heavy
forests and open up their farms, instead of attempting the cultivation of this
land.
Thirty years prior to settlement, as this undergrowth would indicate,
these plains were entirely destitute of wood except a few scattering oaks, pre-
served, as if by design, for shade. These plains were doubtless cultivated
fields of a pre-historic race, whose works of art are still manifest in and
around them, such as the mounds, fortifications and tumuli of Wooster, Plain
and other townships.
Today the leading forest trees are the oaks, with some hickory, chest-
nut. sugar maple, ash, walnut, butternut, cherry, gum, quaking asp, cucumber,
mulberry, buckeye, plum, crab, thorn, willow, prickly ash, locust, hawthorn,
dogwood, alder, etc. The dogwood during May. even at this date, orna-
ments every highland wood with its beautiful flowers, and the lower wood-
lands still teem With fragrance from the blossoms of the thorn and crab.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
STREAMS OF THE COUNTY.
The main stream of Wayne county is the Killbuck; then come the
Chippewa, Mohican, Salt creek, Apple creek and Sugar creek. Killbuck takes
its rise in Canaan and Wayne townships and is in three small branches,
that form junction beyond the center of Canaan township, its waters flowing
toward the north into Medina county, then turning almost west into Con-
gress township, this county,* wherein for about one mile it flows in a southerly
course, meanders through various townships and finally runs about a mile
west of Wooster, leaving Wayne county from Franklin township, entering
Holmes county.
The Chippewa, the next largest water course, has its origin in Chippewa
lake, Medina county. It enters Wayne county near the northwest corner
of Milton township and flows in a southerly direction, thence into Chippewa
township to the east line of Wayne into Stark county. This stream, also
Sugar creek and Newman’s creek, are tributaries of the Tuscarawas, while
the others above named, with their branches, find their way into the Killbuck.
Sugar creek’s source is in East Union and Baughman townships, with
tributaries in Sugarcreek and Paint townships, the chief of which is Grable’s
Fork.
Apple creek has its rise in Wayne and Saltcreek townships, the main
branch flowing through East Union, into Wooster township, and unites
with the Killbuck about one-fourth of a mile southwest of the city of Wooster.
The northern branch rises near the south line of Canaan township and flows
south into Wooster township, uniting with the main stream near Stibb’s old
factory, about a mile east of the city.
Salt creek takes its rise in East Union township and some of its forked
heads come from Saltcreek township. The main stream passes out into
Holmes county.
Newman’s creek consists of two main branches, one rising in Sugar-
creek township and the other in Baughman township. The main stream
rises near Dalton village, flows north to near Fairview, where it turns east,
and after uniting with the north branch, runs into Stark county, forming
junction with the Tuscarawas north of Massillon.
Muddy fork of the Mohican makes a circuit through the southwest corner
of Chester into Plain township, through which it extends in a southeasterly
course to near the center of the township, where it turns to the west and flows
out of the county two miles northwest of the corner of Plain township.
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Little Killbuck creek rises mainly in Chester township, extends into
Wooster township, and unites with the main stream three miles northwest
of the city of Wooster.
Clear creek and Christmas run rise in Wayne township and flow south,
forming junction with the Killbuck in Wooster township, two miles west
of Wooster, on the old Eicher farm; the Christmas run joins the Killbuck
a mile southwest of the city of Wooster. Reddick’s Springs, one of the
branches of Christmas run, at one date furnished an abundant supply of
pure water for the city of Wooster.
The Spring Mills run issues from springs in Plain township, flows south
through the village of Millbrook and about a mile farther south unites with
the Killbuck.
Crawford run, also known as Bahl’s Mill run, has its source in springs in
Wooster and Plain townships, flows southeast and enters the Killbuck about
three miles southwest of Wooster city. It furnishes power for saw-mills
and two grist-mills, yet is only a few miles in length.
Cedar run, a small, pure stream, flowing into Cedar valley, issues from
springs in the highlands of Congress township and from parts of Chester,
uniting with the Killbuck a short distance from where it debouches from the
Cedar valley.
Little Sugar creek is a small stream of some importance, as is also the
north branch of Apple creek. It rises in Canaan and Wayne townships, flow-
ing down through Wayne and Greene, across the corner of East Union into
Sugar creek. This stream runs through the village of Smithville and a short
distance south of Orrville.
The north branch of Apple creek has its source in Wayne township, near
the south line, and flows southwest of Madisonville into Wooster township,
uniting with the east branch near the Stibb’s factory site, one mile east of
Wooster city.
Little Chippewa creek rises in Canaan township, being formed from a
series of pure, cold springs. The main branch runs north into section 13
to the southwest quarter, where it turns northeast and flows into Milton
township and there unites with the Chippewa, west of the village of Amwell.
Besides the streams enumerated, there are smaller ones, which, with
numerous springs, provide an abundance of good water throughout the county.
SURFACE OF THE COUNTY.
The general surface of Wayne county is more rolling than otherwise,
yet it is sufficiently low and level to be well adapted to fanning, grazing and
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general agriculture. The whole face of the county shows the action of water,
from the lowest valleys to the summit of the highest elevation; but when it
was acted upon, is mere conjecture. It is supposed by some that this section
was once a part of one great sea. It should be stated, in this connection,
that the greater portion of the land within Wayne county is susceptible of
cultivation.
PRAIRIES.
There are several large bodies of prairie lands in this county, located
near Wooster, in Wooster, Plain, Canaan, Milton, Clinton, Franklin, Baugh-
man and Sugarcreek townships, the chief, however, being situated in Plain
and Clinton. The origin is not well established, but there is evidence of such
lands having once been under water — probably lakes and marshes — and in
time's course were encroached upon and overgrown by vegetation. In some
places it appears as if islands had once here existed, sometime covered with
timber and often large and aged trees. Some of them, such as Newman's
creek swamp, were covered with a thick underbrush, while others, such as
may be seen near Wooster, contained thrifty trees, with wide, far-reaching
roots. This was tested in Canaan township, near Pike township, during the
construction of the Atlantic & Great Western railway. The surface of the
land there being covered with underbrush and thick sod, was appropriated
by the company for the bed of the road, but suddenly and unexpectedly, with-
out previous indications, a large portion of the track disappeared, passing be-
neath into a hidden lake.
The botany of the prairies presents a wonderful’array of rare flora. Such
lands, during the summer blooming period, are literally covered with the
most beautiful and fragrant flowers.
THE LAKES OF WAYNE COUNTY.
There are still several lakes in this county, while there remain signs of
many extinct ones — beds where once stood lake water — and the scene a thou-
sand or more years ago was a romantic one of river, lake and hillside. Fox
lake, in Baughman township, is the largest of the existing true lakes. Its
location is in a marshy district, known as Tamarack Swamp, in the south-
east corner of sections i, 2, 11 and 12. Its waters are cold, pure and wonder-
fully clear, indicating a series of springs from which it is fed. This lake
was measured or sounded in the seventies, when a man was drowned in its
waters, and it is said that in the center it was upwards of one hundred feet
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deep. Before the advent of white men here, it was a popular fishing resort
for the Indian tribes. It has been a favorite fishing resort for our people for
many decades, and still the fishes are numerous and excellent in quality,
Wayne, Stark and Medina county fishermen frequenting its waters annually.
Patton’s lake is a body of clear, cold water, of an oblong shape, about
one-fourth as large as Fox lake, which is about a third of a mile distant from
it, near the center of section 12 of Baughman township, in the Tamarack
Swamp district. Three small streams flow into this pretty water sheet, its
outlet being on the northwest side. It is not nearly so deep as Fox lake, but
abounds in many fine fishes. The crystal character of water justifies the be-
lief that it contains an interior fountain. The swampy lands near these two
lakes retain a wild condition, and are literally covered (or were in 1878) with
tamarack trees, whortleberries, some growing eight feet high, underbrush,
flags and tall prairie grass. In the marshes once grew great quantities of
cranberries, and as for whortleberries, nowhere in the country can there be
found such a large abundance. In an early day this lake region of Wayne
county was noted for its being a resort for bears, wolves, panthers and wild
cats, which often made night terrible to the hardy pioneers. Deer also took
shelter hereabouts as a refuge from the hunter. Smaller animals, such as
beaver, otter, raccoons, opossums and minks, also resorted here in search for
food and shelter. Once — hundreds of years ago — this entire swamp district
must have been a real lake. Year after year the farmer has encroached on this
territory and reclaimed much of the once worthless swamp, and now may be
seen many luxuriant crops growing on this “rich-as-Nile” soil.
Another lake, called Doner’s lake, is located in Chippewa township. It
is of a circular form ; no stream flows into it and hence it must be fed by in-
ternal springs.
Brown’s lake is situated in Clinton township, and it is not unlike Doner’s
lake, appearing to have an internal supply of water and a constantly flowing
outlet.
Manley’s lake is a small body of clear, cold water in section 16 of Clinton
township. It is situated on highly elevated land and from its eastern side
issues forth a small, never-failing, stream of pure water, sparkling with life
and beauty. From it runs a stream, a branch of the one that flows through
the low lands in the neighborhood of Shreve.
newman’s creek swamp.
The lowlands in the valley of Newman’s creek, extending from the
vicinity of Orrville eastward to beyond the east line of Baughman township,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
known as Newman’s Creek Swamp when the first settlers came to this
county, was the wildest, most inaccessible and dismal district within its
boundaries. At first it was styled the Dismal Swamp and later the Shades of
Death, and for many years none but the brave and daring hunters from
the pioneer band dared enter its confines. It was then literally covered with
tall trees and underbrush, and along the streams were low marshy spots, wffiere
the choicest of cranberries grew in immense quantities. The stream itself
was alive with fishes. Wild potatoes grew there in great abundance, sufficient
to supply the settlers writh food for miles around.
Before the advent of the white settlers Baughman towmship was, about
this sw’amp, a safe retreat for game and wild animals and wras frequented
by the Indians. wrho made it a lurking place, as well as a fishing and hunt-
ing ground. Even after the settlement had grown to considerable impor-
tance there might have been seen here bears, panthers and wrild cats, as w^ell
as elk, deer, etc. Beavers made this their home, as did raccoons and foxes.
Such was the condition of this swamp in 1825 and up to 1830. The upper
end of this sw’amp extended over into Green township and from there cov-
ered the country pretty much all of the way over east to the Stark county
line, thousands of acres being embraced in the swampy wilderness. Since
1838 the woodman’s ax has felled and cleared away the trees and the ditcher’s
spade has drained and reclaimed these once worthless lands. The once “dis-
mal swamp” has come to be a veritable garden spot and the wilderness has
in truth been made to “blossom as the rose.” Today the scene is one of
royal beauty, a landscape that is a feast to the eye of the beholder. For six
miles the plain is unbroken and covered with good farm improvements, w ith
here and there a clump of native timber. This swamp has long since been
described as the bed of a great lake of pre-glacial times. At one remote
time a much larger stream flowred here than is now known as Newsman’s
creek.
KILLBUCK SWAM P.
To the low’ marshy lands between Wooster and Shreve the name of
Killbuck Swamp has long been applied. When the pioneer band first came
into this county a continuous swamp existed between these tw’o points. It
was no doubt a pre-glacial lake bed. The first visible remains of this ancient-
day lake are at the north edge of Wooster city. Seventy-five and eighty years
ago all the low’ lands south and w’est of Wooster w ere covered by water the
entire year round, until boatmen saw fit to remove some of the flood w’ood
and drift lodged in the main channel of the Killbuck. These lands were then
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valueless. The river gradually receded into its banks and soon the flooded
meadows became covered with herbage; but it was long before they became
of much value, even for grazing purposes. This territory is also within
the limits of an immense pre-glacial lake, elsewhere mentioned in this work
by other writers.
The early settlers of Plain and Clinton townships erected their dwellings
and opened up their farms on the margin of an ancient lake, which was then
a beautiful plain, covered with tall grass, flags and prairie flowers, except
that it was studded with ancient islands, then thickly wooded, which re-
sembled oases. Blachleyville stands upon table lands, overlooking the “Big
Meadows,” now styled the Big Prairie, that extends north, west and south
of the village. The scene in the district known as the pre-historic lake coun-
try and the Killbuck Swamp has in the last half century been completely
transformed, and one who saw it then would not know it today were he
to come back and visit this location.
COAL MINES OF THE COUNTY.
Perhaps no better description of the coal measure of Wayne county can
here be furnished than that given by Hon. John P. Jeffries, who, in the Doug-
las history of the county, published in 1878, gave the facts as they then ex-
isted, and from which this chapter is largely made up. Before passing to
the record made by Mr. Jeffries, a thorough geological student, it may be
stated that the United States census reports for 1902 give the total number
of tons of coal mined in Wayne county for that year to have been seventy-
four thousand eight hundred and twenty-four. Its estimated mine value
was fixed at one dollar and seventy-nine cents per ton, or a total of one hun-
dred forty thousand one hundred and fifty-three dollars. At the present
date Wayne is one of the twenty-nine coal producing counties in Ohio.
Of the various mines being worked in 1878, Mr. Jeffries is the authority
for these statements : The coal mines in Chippewa township number ten,
including those known as the Jacob Wegandt mine, the Peter Frase mine, the
Holm mines, the Boak mine, the California mine, the Franks mine, the
Woods mine, the Simmons shaft, Muter’s coal bank. The coal from the
mines within this township is of an excellent quality, equal to the celebrated
Mahoning coal.
In Milton township the coal measure is confined to eight sections of the
civil township in the northern part. Much coal has been mined here at
different periods since the coal of the county was first discovered.
In Green township the coal measure is limited to a small territory, though-
of recent years it has been a paying product.
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In Baughman township as early as 1877 there were mines doing a
flourishing business, as follows : The Burton bank. Jacob E. Wenger’s shaft,
on section 28, where the coal is four and a half feet thick. It is reached at
a depth of thirty-eight feet from the surface. Then there was the John
Spindler mine, opened by him about 1850. Across the swamp, one-half
mile northwest from Fairview, is the Todd coal mine, the Becker mines,
the Neiswanger mine, the Carroll mine. It is believed that coal of fine grade
exists under almost the entire surface of the land within Baughman township.
East Union township is another good coal-bearing section of the county,
covering as it does the entire underlaying territory, except possibly a few
sections. At first the coal was not found in thickness sufficient to be profitable,
but in later years lower veins have been discovered that measure in many
places seven feet in thickness and not over seventy feet from the surface.
Still later developments have disclosed a still greater wealth of coal in this
township.
In Paint township the mines in operation before the eighties were :
The Charles Brown mine, one mile west of Mt. Eaton; the Hunsinger mine,
three and one-half feet in thickness; George Mathoit’s mine; Dr. Roth’s coal
bank; Peter Graber’s mines; the Flory mines; the Mt. Eaton mines, located
in the village. Later developments in this township proved that paying-
quantities of good coal were to be found at almost any portion of the ter-
ritory, at a depth that would pay rich returns for mining and hoisting. In
fact the coal here mined now is among the finest grades in Wayne county
and has been a source of great revenue to the owners.
The Sugarcreek township coal mines were first opened by drift on the
west side of the hill on the farm of Mr. Gochenour, one mile to the west
of Dalton, about 1830, but the mine having a defective roof, it was soon
abandoned. Another mine was opened a mile west of Dalton on the Peter
Buchanan farm; another on the Bashford land, where the vein was over
three feet thick. On the David Rudy place still another paying mine prop-
erty was located many years ago. The coal of this entire township is ac-
companied by a fine grade of fire clay of great value commercially; also
limestone and some iron ore and mineral paint, red and yellow ochre. In
short the entire township is one vast coal and general mineral field.
The coal mines of Saltcreek township have long since come to be well
known and very productive and valuable to operate. The Finley mine in
1878, on the farm of Mrs. Delano Jeffries, on section 4, was being operated
by Frank Becker. Under this coal strata was found a sand rock seven feet
in thickness. The Daniel Ream farm, on the southwest quarter of section
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4, has been fully described by Prof. M. C. Reed in his “Geological Survey
of Ohio.” The Stutz mine was opened on section 23, where a four-foot
vein was disclosed and has long been worked. The Henning mine, on the
Adam Henning place, is five feet in thickness. There is considerable iron ore
in this section of the county.
The coal mines of Franklin township in 1877 were those of William
Harrison, a mile and a half southwest of Fredericksburg. The roof of this
mine was yellow sand stone. The coal was reached at the depth of eighty
feet. The James Finley mines, in this township, are located on section 22,
about two and a half miles from Fredericksburg, and were operated in 1878
by Asaph Rumbaugh. The coal was struck at the depth of seventy-five
feet from the surface. Another Franklin township mine was Charles Story’s,
which vein was three feet in thickness. Coal was also found at an early
date on the Miller land in section 34, but it was too thin a vein to be profitably
mined. On the Jacob and Israel Franks farm, in section 35, another mine
was developed, in connection with a stratum of fire clay that was used for
many years in the Wooster pottery works, and fire brick were also made of
this clay which was thought superior to any in the county at that day.
The coal measure in Clinton, Canaan and Wooster townships is some-
what limited, says Jeffries in his article written in 1878. The absence of
paying quantities of coal at and near the city of Wooster is easily accounted
for when one considers the formation of the sub-strata of the earth at this
point.
Since the writings on the coal measure of Wayne county in 1878, there
have been many developments and great has been the tonnage of good bitumi-
nous coal from the scores of mines in the vicinity, but more especially in the
townships named and carefully described by him, and also confirmed by the
state geologists.
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CHAPTER V.
EARLY SETTLEMENT OF THE COUNTY.
Where late the savage, hid in ambush, lay,
Or roamed the uncultured valleys for his prey,
Her hardy gifts rough industry extends,
The groves bow down, the lofty forest bends ;
And see the lofty spires of towns and cities rise,
And domes and cities swell unto the skies.
— Meigs.
Wayne county’s earliest pioneers were largely from Pennsylvania, Mary-
land, Virginia and far-away New Jersey. New England also was fairly
represented among the early settlers. But by far the greater number came
in from Pennsylvania.
Intelligence was the rule among the first band of settlers who here sought
out lands and builded for themselves homes. They possessed iron nerve
and a will that made the dreary wilderness soon take on the aspect of a
blooming garden spot. They had to encounter many a hardship ere this was
accomplished. They contended with the hostile Indian tribes, the perils of
storm and flood, the unbridged and swollen streams, with new country sick-
ness, “homesickness” and a hundred and one trials and privations unknown
to the population of the twentieth century.
These hardy pioneers never surrendered to disaster or trembled before
uncalculating misfortune. Manhood was fully tested. His adversities made
him, oak-like, grow the stronger. When memory caused the eye at times
to weep, — when the flood interposed — when the ravine stayed his progress —
when the mountain and hillside overshadowed him, — then it was that the
Wayne county pioneer forgot father and mother, home and childhood; then it
was that his moral stature developed into giant outlines. His ax was his
trusty companion; his devoted wife his assurance of triumph and well poised
confidence. His cause was religion, civilization and man. He trod the for-
ests of the county, viewing its “green, glad solitude” with an ever open and
keen eye.
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As another has written, “He persistently struggled, and how heroically
he suffered, how faithfully he toiled, we who succeed him and have lived
to see what he foresaw, and whose privilege it is to honor and venerate him,
most tenderly remember and sensitively know. They had an unshaken
faith in their mission and the benign and comprehensive results that were
to flow from it.”
Washington might well say of the colony that was settled upon the
Muskingum: “None in America were occupied under such favorable aus-
pices. Information, property and strength will be its characteristics. I know
many of the settlers personally, and there never were better men calculated
to promote the welfare of such a community.,,
It was not their sole motive to establish government, but to make it the
protector and hand-maid of religion, for, said they, “Religion and government
commenced in those parts of the globe where the sun first rose in its effulgent
majesty. They have followed after him in his brilliant course ; nor will they
cease till they have accomplished in this western world the consummation
of all things.”
So may it be recorded of Wayne county’s early settlers. While it may
be partly true that many of them were actuated by a desire to augment their
riches and possess innumerable acres, they were also inspired by a nobler
ambition and had loftier incitements than the dread omnipotence of gold.
While they were seeking to promote their own welfare and discharge their
duties to themselves and their government, they were not forgetful of their
higher Christian duties. In many instances, with the smoke that curled from
the chimneys of their cabins ascended the incense of prayer. The rude pio-
neer hut, instead of being the abode of the little family cluster alone, became
a temple of worship, and the gray old woods resounded with the simple but
pathetic and eloquent prayers of pious men.
What a contrast between those long-ago days of the early years of the
nineteenth century and those of today — a hundred years later? Again let
us linger with and talk of the early emigrants in Wayne county, who verily
builded better than they knew. They were lone dwellers of the forests.
Their daily necessities and wants were as numerous and multiplied as the
inhabitants of older communities. Necessarily they were so situated as to
make it impossible for all of them to be gratified. Schools and churches, there
were none. The intellectual as well as the moral training of their children
devolved upon themselves to a great extent. The child was the pupil, while
the parents were of necessity the real educators. If they were fortunate
enough to have a minister in their midst, all the better: if not, their spiritual
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
recreations consisted in prayer meetings and the private but equally orthodox
methods of interchange of Christian views and religious experiences.
Streams were then all unbridged and roads were cut by the pioneers
through the dense forests. Cabins were to be built, but the saw-mill existed
only in the memory of the older states from which they had emigrated. The
professional tradesman was missing, unless perchance he was an integral of
the colony; but a market would have been superfluous, as there was little
either for sale or exchange.
With the exception of mere patches along the larger streams or on the
lowlands, the surface was overgrown or covered with trees and bushes. The
bear, wolf, catamount and deer held sway, with no one to contest their rights
as supreme rulers. The passage from the settlers’ homes through the wilder-
ness was attended with much discomfort, privation and peril. Their journey-
ings were slow and painfully tedious. They were not made in the stateroom
of a Pullman palace car, speeding like a mighty whirlwind around curves of
the iron highway of this day and age. A footman was no prodigy of the
road in those long-ago days. To bestride the faithful horse, mount the
wagon or help draw the cart, was no disgrace then to either man or woman.
Weeks and even months were consumed in their joumeyings westward, and
their nightly bedchamber was but the tent or bare ground beneath the cov-
ered wagon. Here husband, wife and infant sank to slumbers, serenaded
by the cry of wild beasts and wild winds. Here the uncertain flint-lock
gun and the trusty dog were ever on watch and in readiness to repel invasion.
They made their own farm utensils, as well as the apparel they wore. Wild
turkeys and deer were in abundance, so they were supplied with meats; and
in the absence of Oolong and Young Hyson tea, they sipped the sassafras and
spice-wood teas. But contentment was there, if not riches.
As to the good housewife and mother of the pioneer band in Wayne
county, one writer has beautifully spoken: “Heaven’s blessings be upon
them! How comforting to believe that in that procession of beatified and
redeemed souls which forever circle around the throne and remain the near-
est to the Master, the mothers are there! If it be so endearing in heaven as
it is on earth, angels will whisper it, and the name of Mother will be next
in sweetness to ‘Our Father, which are in Heaven.’ ”
Among the unalloyed traits of the pioneer in this, as well as in most new
countries, hospitality was ever foremost. The stranger never failed to receive
a hearty welcome at the cabin home of these friendly people. Did he ask
for bread, he always received the best loaf at hand. Lodging was seldom,
if indeed ever, refused the weary one. While the fare was coarse, it was
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handed out freely and graciously received. Then, too, there was a warmth
and genuineness in the hand-shake hardly known to the twentieth-century
generation. Women used no cosmetics; they were false in no sense, but lived
as nature had formed them and home life was pure, sweet and simple. From
these pioneer homes came forth the Garfields and McKinleys and many of
the noble men who have from time to time graced the loftiest positions in
the nation. These fathers and mothers taught their children to be useful,
and always insisted that the useful should be the foundation for the orna-
mental.
But now the kind reader is asked to leap the chasm of a hundred years
in the history of the kingdom of Wayne — span the distance between the his-
toric Then and the eventful Now.
The pioneer cabin has long since gone to decay and most of the inmates
of these primitive homes have years and decades ago joined that innumerable
caravan that has crossed the deep waters of the river of death, leaving only
their well-trained offspring and the sweet memory of the summer of their
lives as monuments to who they were and what works they wrought out in
this section of the Buckeye state. But be it recorded to their credit that they
left an imperishable name for honor and patriotism and that their virtues
have been handed down even to this the first decade in the progressive twen-
tieth century. The departure from the ways of the forefathers has, of course,
been wide and very marked. New systems have obtained. New systems of
farming and new business methods have been ushered in with the passing
of the years since the first settlers blazed their way through this goodly land
and finally selected a spot on which to erect their cabin home. New imple-
ments are used, new plans of agriculture and merchandise have long since
been employed. The human savage and the savage l>east that roamed at
will through the dark forest have forever gone and a new type of Christian
civilization has come in, yet the foundation for all this modern greatness was
laid by the axman of ninety and more years ago.
In reality, it is to be questioned whether that high moral type of noble
fatherhood, motherhood and childhood obtains here that once prevailed. Yet
with the loss of some of the priceless virtues Wayne county possessed in the
century past, it should be said that, in the main, the present-day progress in
morality and religious sentiment is indeed praiseworthy of an enlightened,
educated and highly refined people. Since the first generations of this county
passed from earth’s shining circle, it should be remembered that Ohio and
Wayne county have produced many eminent statesmen and religionists. It
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
was after all these pioneer characters passed away that the world was made
better by such loyal liberty-loving men as Grant, Garfield and McKinley, all of
whom were children of this soil. Ohio need not simply point to the Presi-
dents, but to the larger number of gallant soldiers and later true statesmen.
May the memory of the departed pioneers — our good ancestors — long
be cherished and their names be held in admiring esteem and true reverence.
The shore, the palm, the victory — their rest is yonder!
THE FIRST SETTLEMENTS IN WAYNE COUNTY.
The first four settlements effected in Wayne county, Ohio, were made
as follows (substantiated by former historians, including Ben Douglas —
lately deceased — and John Larwill, both of whom made careful investigation
along this* important line) :
The first settlement by white men in this county of whom there is now
any authentic account was William Larwill, a native of Kent, England, who
dated his settlement as far back as 1806. He was a brother of Joseph and
John Larwill, who came to the county a year later, 1807, the former in
the employment of John Bever, United States surveyor, who was then en-
gaged in running off the county into sections. And here on the present site
of Wooster was made the first settlement in Wayne county.
The second settlement in the county was made by James Morgan, a
native of Virginia, but of Welsh ancestry, who selected a place in Franklin
township, early in the spring of 1808. He came in to Ohio and squatted on
the Mohican, in 1806, but removed to Franklin township in the year above
named, entering lands composing the farm owned later by Thomas Doty.
Thomas Butler, born in Virginia also, emigrated to this township in 1808,
and married Rebecca, daughter of James Morgan, April 12, 1809.
The third settlement in the county was made by James Goudy, father
of John Goudy, who later resided in Dalton, Sugarcreek township. He re-
moved from Jefferson county, Ohio, and located two miles southwest of
Dalton, in the autumn of 1809. James Goudy was in General St. Clair’s de-
feat, November 4, 1791, and was wounded in the thigh by a bullet, which
for many years he carried in his body and which finally caused his death.
The fourth settlement was brought alxmt by the coming of Oliver Day
in either 1809 or 1810 (Hon. John Larwill was of the opinion that he came
first in 1809). He removed to E:ist Union township, not far from “Cross
Keys/’ and settled on the farm later owned by Jonas Huntsberger. He was
a native of Vermont, as were his companions, Ezekiel Wells, M. D. ; old
Jonathan Mansfield and Vestey Frary, who accompanied him — this being
the first of the New England settlement — and “’Square Day.’’ as he was
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called was keeping a place of entertainment at what was long afterwards
known as “Carr’s tavern*’ when General Beall’s army passed. The first trans-
fer of real estate on the public records of the county recorder’s office of
Wayne county was made by Oliver Day.
The settlements in the various townships of the county of which this
volume is an authentic history, will be found under the various township
headings in the Township History chapter.
PIONEER FAMILIES.
The subjoined is a list of the heads of families residing in Wayne county
in 1810, according to the United States census returns: Jacob Amman,
Andrew Alexander, Benjamin Bunn, Conrad Bowers, James Beam, Josiah
Crawford, Jesse Cornelius, Daniel Doty, John L. Dawson, John Driskel,
Thomas Eagle, Alexander Finley, Jacob Foulks, Jonathan Grant, Philip
Griffith, Richard Healey, Joseph Hughes, Baptiste Jerome, David Kimpton,
William Kelley, William Laylin, Andrew Luckey, Robert Meeks. Hugh
Moore, William Metcalf, Samuel Matin, Stephen Morgan, Vatchel Metcalf,
Benjamin Miller, John Newell, Amos Norris, William Nixon, James S. Priest,
Westel Ridgley, Jesse Richards, David Smith, Valentine Smith, Jr., Isariah
Smith, Christian Smith, John Smith, Philip Smith, Valentine Smith, Sr.,
Michael Switzer, Ebenezer Warner.
(8)
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CHAPTER VI.
ORGANIZATION OF WAYNE COUNTY.
No historian was able to correctly define the boundary lines of Wayne
county until the problem was solved by the zealous research of Hon. John
P. Jeffries, assisted by Ben Douglas and Hon. R. M. Stimson, state librarian,
and this was not accomplished until 1878. This statement has reference
to the original county, its bounds and the various changes which narrowed
it down to its present limits.
Wayne county was established by proclamation of Gen. Arthur St. Clair,
who, when the Northwest Territory was created into a government, was
chosen as its governor. He was appointed in 1788, and continued to hold
his office until Ohio was admitted into the Union as a state in 1803. The
proclamation for that purpose bears date August 15, 1796. It was the third
county formed in the great Northwest Territory, Washington county being the
first, and Hamilton county the second, the former embracing all of the territory
east of the Scioto and Cuyahoga rivers, and the latter what is now south-
western Ohio, which includes all the territory between the Big and Little
Miami rivers, and extending north to what is known as the “Standing Stone
Forks/’ on the first designated stream. The early boundaries were illy sur-
veyed and were in no sense accurate. The investigations carried on by the
historians alxwe mentioned — especially that made by Ben Douglas — record
the bounds of Wayne county (original) as follows:
MOUTH OF THE CUYAHOGA RIVER,
where it empties into Lake Erie, at Cleveland, thence following up that
river to the “Old Portage” (a carrying place from which goods were trans-
ferred on the river to what is known as “New Portage,” in .Summit county,
on the Tuscarawas river), now known as Akron. Summit county, thence
diverging from the Cuyahoga river in a southerly direction, across the sum-
mit to a point on the Tuscarawas river, near New Portage, in the same
county: thence following the Tuscarawas through the county of Stark to
the junction of the Big Sandy and Tuscarawas, at the north line of Tus-
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carawas county, and there terminating the eastern original boundary of
Wayne county ; thence in a southwestern direction on the Greenville treaty
line.
THE OLD GREENVILLE TREATY LINE.
On the county line between Stark and Tuscarawas, to the east line of
Holmes county; thence across Holmes county to the northeast corner of
Knox county; thence on the line between Knox and Ashland county to the
southeast corner of Richland county; thence to the line between Richland
and Knox counties, to the northeast corner of Pike township, Knox county;
thence across the townships of Pike, Berlin, Middlebury, in Knox county,
to the east line of Morrow county; thence across Morrow county on the
south line of the townships of Franklin, Gilead and Cardington, in Morrow
county, to the southeast corner of Marion county; thence on the line be-
tween Marion and Morrow counties to the northeast corner of Waldo town-
ship, in Marion county; thence on the line between Waldo and Richland
townships, to the southwest corner of Richland township; thence across the
townships of Waldo and Prospect, to the east line of Union county; thence
across Union county, on the south line of the townships of Jackson and Wash-
ington, to the east line of Logan county ; thence across Bokescreek and Rush-
creek townships to the southeast corner of McArthur township; thence on a
line between McArthur, Lake and Harrison townships, to the east line
of Shelby county; thence across Shelby county, between Jackson and
Salem townships, and across the townships of Franklin, Turtle Creek and
McLean, to the present site of old Fort Loramie, in McLean township, in
Shelby county, this line terminating at the point of the beginning of the old
Greenville treaty line; thence in a northwestern direction from Fort Loramie
to the southeast comer of Darke county; thence continuing on the same
bearing across section 7, of Jackson township, Auglaize county; thence across
the townships of Marion and Greenville, to the southeast corner of Recovery
township to Fort Recovery, in Mercer county ; thence north, bearing to the
west through Recovery township, crossing the state line near the northwest
corner of section 7, entering the state of Indiana in the county of Jay;
thence continuing in the same direction through Adams county, to Fort
Wayne, in Allen county; thence west bearing to the north through the coun-
ties of Allen, Whitley, Kosciusko, Marshall, Starke, Porter and Lake, in the
state of Indiana, to the most southern point of Lake Michigan ; thence around
that lake northward through the counties of Cook and Lake, in the state of
Illinois, striking the summit of the highest lands to the westward of the lake
far enough to include the lands upon the streams emptying into Lake Mich-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
igan, crossing the state line between Illinois and Wisconsin about twenty miles
west of the lake shore; thence in a northerly direction through the counties
of Kenosha, Racine, Waukesha and Ozoukee, near the western shore of Lake
Michigan; thence turning in a northwestern direction, following the summit
of the high lands which divide the waters flowing into the lakes from those
running into the Mississippi, through the counties of Sheboygan and Fond du
Lac ; thence in a western direction, crossing the southeastern corner of Green
Lake county, through the northern part of Columbia county, near the site
of old Fort Winnebago, to the southeast corner of Adams county, the west-
ern part of Waushaka county, the southeast corner of Portage county, the
western part of Waupaca county, the western part of Shawanaw, aiong the
western line of Oconto, following the dividing ridge to the state line between
Wisconsin and Michigan; thence along the line between Canada and the
United States; thence along that boundary, through Lake Superior, Lake
Huron, the River St. Clair, and Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie, to the mouth
of Cuyahoga river, the place of beginning.
It will be observed that Wayne county at first embraced a large scope of
territory, including one-third of present Ohio, one-eighth of Indiana, the
northeast corner of Illinois, including the site of Chicago, the eastern one-
fifth part of Wisconsin, the whole of the state of Michigan, embracing all of
Lake Michigan, one-half of the area of Lake Superior, Huron, St. Clair and
the northwestern part of Lake Erie, including the battleground on which
Perry’s victory was achieved.
The county seat of this vast domain, that contained one hundred thirty-
three thousand square miles, and was larger than England, Ireland, Scotland
and Wales, was located at Detroit, which city is still in a county named Wayne.
The county seat remained at that point until eight years had gone by, and
two years after the state constitution had been adopted and the government
of Ohio had been established.
THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE.
This was situated in the northeast part of the state and is bounded on
the south by the forty-first parallel of north latitude; on the west by the
present counties of Sandusky and Seneca; on the north by Lake Erie; on
the east by the state line between Ohio and Pennsylvania. It had been grant-
ed to the colony of Connecticut in 1662 by Charles II, and reserved by the
state of Connecticut, after the American Revolution, in its deed of cession to
the government of the United States, with a view to compensate its Revo-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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lutionary soldiers for losses in that war, by granting its warrant to such
sufferers for portions of this reserved territory.
In 1803, by acts of the State Legislature, the counties of Montgomery,
Greene and Franklin were formed. These three counties extended north to
the state line, and it will be seen that they divided the original Wayne county,
separating all the territory east of Franklin — it being the furtherest east
of the three named counties — south of the Connecticut Western Reserve and
north cf the old Greenville treaty line, from the balance of the territory of
Wayne county, leaving it without any county organization, form or name,
and afterwards known as the New Purchase.
For five years this territory, called the New Purchase, remained without
government other than as a part of the unorganized territory of the state of
Ohio. By act of the General Assembly of Ohio, February 13, 1808, the
boundaries of the county of Wayne were clearly defined in the third section
of the act to establish the county of Stark. The entire section of this act
is here given:
BOUNDARIES OF WAYNE COUNTY IN l8o8.
“Section 3. Be it further enacted, that all that tract of country lying
west of the tenth range and east of the sixteenth range in the said New
Purchase, and south of the Connecticut Reserve, and north of the United
States Military District, shall be a separate and distinct courity, by the name
of Wayne, but with the county of Stark attached to and made a part of
Columbiana county, until the said county of Stark shall be organized (Janu-
ary 1, 1809), and shall thereafter be, and remain a part of the county of
Stark until otherwise directed by law.,, — See Ohio. Leg. Reports, Vol. VI,
Page 155. -
The first boundary of Wayne county, established by legislative enact-
ment, may be more specifically defined, as follows: On the east by the
present county line between Wayne and Stark counties; on the south by the
old Greenville treaty line, including a strip of Holmes county, as now or-
ganized, about two and a half miles wide at the west end, which strip of
territory compassed all of Washington and Ripley townships in that county,
nearly all of Prairie, two-thirds of Salt Creek, half of Paint, and fractions
of Knox and Monroe townships; on the west by the west line of Lake, Mo-
hican, Perry and Jackson townships, in Ashland county; and on the north
by the present county line between Medina and Wayne.
The change of the last description was made by act of the Legislature
establishing Holmes county. January 20, 1824, which took from the south
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
side of Wayne county the strip of territory above referred to, lying between
the old Greenville treaty line and the present southern boundary of Wayne
county. ' '
ASHLAND COUNTY TAKEN FROM WAYNE.
February 24, 1846. by act of the Legislature, Ashland county was taken
from the territory of Wayne county. There have been no other changes in the
territory of this once extensive county of Wayne.
WAYNE COUNTY ORGANIZED IN l8l2.
By an act of the Ohio State Legislature, dated January 4. 1812, Wayne
county was organized, the same taking effect March 1, 1812. This act reads
as follows:
“That the county of Wayne be and the same is hereby organized into a
separate county.”
The same law provided that the people of the county should elect county
officers on the first Monday of April, 1812, to hold their offices until the next
annual election. To the year 1810. Wayne county was one entire township,
by the name of Killbuck, called after the old Indian chief of that name.
ORGANIZATION OF TOWNSHIPS.
Wayne county’s townships were organized in the following manner:
April 11, 1812, the county was divided into four townships, to-wit: Sugar-
creek, Wooster, Mohican and Prairie.
The present territory of Wayne county was surveyed by the United
States surveyors in 1807. The ranges were strips of territory, six miles wide,
numbered from east to west, and extending from the old Greenville treaty
line northward to the south line of the Connecticut Western Reserve — a dis-
tance averaging over thirty miles. These ranges were again surveyed into sec-
tions of about one mile square, or containing six hundred and forty acres, and
numbered from one to thirty-six, beginning at the northeast comer, and
each thirty-six sections being designated a township. These townships were
again numbered from the south end of each range northwardly.
Range Xo. 1 1 of the original government survey was the eastern and
first range in the county, and in 1812 contained the originally surveyed town-
ships. numbered 15, 16. 17 and 18 and a small fraction of township 14.
Range No. 12 contained a small fraction of township 14 and all of
townships 15, 16, 17 and 18.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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Range No. 13 contained a small fraction of township 13 and all of
townships 14, 15, 16 and 17.
Range No. 14 contained a fraction of township 17 and all of town-
ships 18, 19, 20 and 21.
Range No. 15 contained a fraction of township 19 and all of town-
ships 20, 21, 22 and 23.
The orders of the county commissioners, bearing date April 11, 1812,
clearly defined each of the original townships as follows:
Mohican township included all of range 15 in the county, and the west
half of range 14.
Prairie township, beginning at the center of range 14 and at the corner
of sections 3, 4, 9, 10 in township 18, of range 14; thence east to the eastern
boundary of the county; thence south to the southeast comer of the county;
thence westwardly on the south boundary of the county, to the center of
range 14, and thence north to place of beginning.
Wooster township began at the center of range 14, at the corner of
sections 3, 4, 9 and 10, in township 18;. thence north to the northern boundary
of the county; thence east to the range line between ranges 12 and 13; thence
south on said range line to the corner of sections 1,6, 12 and 7, in township
14 of range 13, and township 15, in range 12, and thence west to place of
beginning.
Sugarcreek township contained all of the originally surveyed townships
16, 1 7 and 18 and the northern tier of sections in township 15, in range 11, and
all of the originally surveyed townships 16, 17 and 18 and the northern
tier of sections in township 15, in range 12.
By order :>f the county commissioners, September 15, 1814, East Union
and Lake townships were formed, the former embracing originally surveyed
townships 16, 17 and 18 and the northern tier of sections in township 15, in
range 12, the latter embracing the fraction of originally surveyed township
19 and all of township 20, in range 15, and the west half of originally sur-
veyed township j8, and the west half of fractional township 17 in range 14.
September 14, 1814, four days after Commodore Perry’s victory on
Lake Erie, the county commissioners entered an order of record, changing
the name of Mohican township to that of Perry.
On the 5th of June, 1815, the county commissioners formed the town-
ship of Springfield, as follows : Beginning at ihe northeast corner of section
24, township 19 (now Plain), range 14; thence west to the northwest corner
of section 20. township 18 (now Clinton) ; thence east to the southeast
corner of section 24, the range line; thence north on the range line to the
place of beginning.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
September 4, 1815, Chippewa township was formed, beginning at the
southeast corner of section 31, of township 18, range 11, original survey;
thence north, bearing to the west, to the northwest comer of section 6; thence
east to the northeast corner of the county; thence south on the county line
to the southeast corner of section 36 ; thence to the place of beginning.
Baughman township was named the originally surveyed township 17,
range 11, on March 5, 1816.
Saltcreek township was established March 5, 1816, its territory includ-
ing all of the originally surveyed township 15 and fractional township 14,
of range 12.
At the last named session of the county commissioners, Paint township
was formed from all of the originally surveyed township No. 15 and frac-
tional part of township 14, in range 11.
At the last date named, originally surveyed townships 20 and 21, in
range 14. were named Chester township, and an order issued to the inhabit-
ants to elect officers.
Wayne township was formed by order of the commissioners October 12,
1816, of the following territory: All of the originally surveyed townships
16 and 17, of range 13.
Green township was formed February 5, 1817, of all of the original
townships 17 and 18, of range 12.
Congress township was formed October 3, 1818, of the originally sur-
veyed township 21, of range 14.
Milton township was formed of the originally surveyed township 18, of
range 12, by order of the county commissioners.
Jackson township was formed of the originally surveyed township 23, of
range 15, February 1, 1819.
Canaan township was formed May 5, 1819, of the originally surveyed
township 17, of range 13.
Plain township was formed as early as 1817 (no definite date now
recorded), and it was composed of territory included in the original govern-
ment survey of township 19, of range 14. Its formation obliterated the north
half of Springfield township, formed on June 5, 1815.
Franklin township is composed of part of the originally surveyed town-
ships 14 and 15, of range 13. June 7, 1820, the county commissioners
bounded the township as follows : Beginning at the northeast corner of
section 24, in township 15; thence south on the range line to the southeast
corner of section 13, in township 14; thence west on the south side of sections
13 to 18 inclusive, to the range line on the west side of range 13 ; thence north
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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on the range line to the northwest corner of section 6, township 14; thence
east to the northeast comer of section 5; thence north to the northwest
corner of section 28, township 15; thence east to the northeast
corner of section 28; thence north to the northwest corner of section 22,
township 15; thence east to place of beginning.
March 7, 1825, and after the formation of Holmes county, in 1824, by
order of the county commissioners *the above last-named township was
enlarged by the attachment of the southern tiers of sections, — 19 to 24 inclu-
sive,— since which time no changes have been made in its boundaries.
Pike township was formed in 1817 and was composed of the exact terri-
tory which now constitutes Clinton township, and the formation blotted out
the south half and all the balance of Springfield left after the formation of
Plain township. And thus, after a brief existence of two years, Springfield
township disappeared from the records and map of Wayne county.
June 7, 1825, Clinton township, the last of the present sixteen townships
of Wayne county, was formed, by an order of the commissioners of that
date. Its boundaries then were the same as now, and its formation struck
from the map of Wayne county the township of Pike.
Thus it will be observed how the settlement of the county, from time
time, produced the organization of the various townships, and established,
as the necessities of the people required, their local governments.
ORIGIN OF NAME OF WAYNE COUNTY.
This county was named in honor of Major-General Anthony Wayne, an
ardent patriot of the Revolutionary war. He was a native of Waynesborough,
Chester county, Pennsylvania, born January 1, 1745. He had a brilliant
career and died in 1796 in a cabin at Presque Isle and, at his own request,
was buried under a flag staff of the fort. In 1809, his son removed his
body to Radnor cemetery, in Delaware county, Pennsylvania, where a monu-
ment is erected to his honor.
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CHAPTER VII.
COUNTY GOVERNMENT.
Wayne county was organized, as before related, January 4, 1812, and the
machinery of a separate county government set in motion on the 4th of March
that year. The first election for county officers was held on the first Monday
in April, and such officers were to hold their term only until the next annual
election. Up to 1810 what wras styled Killbuck tow-nship comprised the
entire county, but April 12, 1812, the county was divided into four civil
townships, Sugarcreek, Wooster, Mohican and Prairie.
The first set of county officers elected were: Josiah Crawford, sheriff;
William Smith, (appointed) treasurer in 1812; Roswell M. Mason, prosecut-
ing attorney; James Morgan, Jacob Foulkes and John Carr, county commis-
sioners; William Larwill, clerk of the court of common pleas; Benjamin
Ruggles, president judge of the court of common pleas; Christian Smith,
David Kimpton and John Cisna, associate judges.
The first work of the county commissioners was to divide the county
into the four civil townships named and look after proposed roads in the
newly organized county, as well as to provide some suitable place for the
county offices to be established.
THE FIRST . COUNTY SEAT.
The original seat of justice for Wayne county wras that designated by
the locating commissioners, and was on the eminence east and south of wrhere
Wooster nowr stands, on lands then owned by Bazaleel Wells and company,
and was called Madison. It was not satisfactory to the people, whereupon
the Legislature appointed new commissioners, and they selected wdiat is now
Wooster as the permanent county seat. But a single cabin wras erected in
Madison.
The first place of holding court was on the old “Fin” Weed livery stable
grounds on East Liberty street, in an old log shanty built by John Bever.
The March term. 1813, was held at the house of Josiah Crawrford. In 1814
wras built the Baptist church, a frame structure, in the rear of the lot where
later the Reformed church was built, and in this building, for a time, court
was held. The county paid fifty dollars a year rent.
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THE COURT HOUSE HISTORY.
The first court house was built by the proprietors of the town of Wooster,
Messrs. Larwill, Bever and Henry, in 1819. It was among the conditions
with which they agreed to comply when the county seat was changed from
the original seat of justice, Madison, to Wooster, that they should erect a
three-story building with a gallery, built of brick, a part of which was occu-
pied by the county officers and the Freemasons order. It stood on the site
of the present beautiful court house, on the northwest corner of the public
square. It was burned in 1828, during a term of court, and some of the
papers and public records of the court and county were lost. It was in 1823
that a bell was placed on this building, the same being a donation by John
Bever, one of the townsite men.
The next court house was erected in 1831-32 and from the files of the
Advocate , dated September, 1833, it is gleaned that “the court house is a
noble edifice, only finished this spring, and cost seven thousand, two hundred
dollars ($7,200). It is doubtless the handsomest in the state, if not in the
United States, and confers much credit on the enterprising architect, Mr. Mc-
Curdy. It is covered with lead, and from the cupola may be had an agreeable,
variegated view of the village and surrounding country.’’
Among the novel and attractive features of the superstructure were two
large metal balls, made of copper, by John Babb, and these ornamented the
spire. They held, of liquid measure, about twenty-five gallons and one and
a half gallons, respectively.
Within this court house many an early-day scene in the history of the
county was enacted. It stood as a safe and substantial building until time
had wrought its inroads on its walls and it finally became a dilapidated,
dangerous building, no longer safe for use as a public building. In the sum-
mer of 1877 the city council of Wooster condemned it as a public building
and later the county commissioners, after fully investigating its condition,
confirmed the opinion of the city council. The place for holding court was
then transferred to France's Hall, on West Liberty street, where its sessions
were held until a new court house could be provided.
February 16 and 18, 1878, meetings of the members of the Wayne
county bar and other citizens were held in Wooster to take action, by which
the matter of a new court house should be set in motion. Hon. John Mc-
Sweeney was chairman of this meeting the first day and Hon. John P.
Jeffries on the last day. Col. Benjamin Eason and Capt. A. S. McClure acted
in the capacity of secretaries.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
A committee was selected to prepare a memorial to the Legislature,
setting forth the need of a new building, and also to draft a bill to be pre-
sented to the Legislature for its approval, authorizing the county commis-
sioners to issue bonds in an amount not exceeding seventy-five thousand
dollars, with which to erect a new court house, the same to be built in the
city of Wooster. Such committee was composed of the following named
gentlemen : Hon. George Rex, John H. Kauke, Esq., Judge J. H. Downing,
Hon. Ben Eason, D. D. Miller, Esq., Capt. A. S. McClure, Col. E. P. Bates,
J. K. McBride, John Zimmerman, Esq., Hon. M. Welker, Hon. Aquila
Wiley, Hon. John Brinkerhoff, E. Quinby, Jr., Esq., Hon. John P. Jeffries,
Hon. E. B. Eshleman, A. T. Thomas, Esq., Hon. John McSweeney, Ohio F.
Jones, Esq., Hon. C. C. Parsons, M. C. Rouch, Esq., G. P. Emrich, Esq.,
Prof. L. Firestone, Hon. J. W. Baughman.
The memorial and bill were duly sent on to the state capital and thus
was laid the legal foundation for the construction of the handsome court
house that still serves well its purpose. It stands on the site of all previous
court houses in Wayne county and is a model of excellence and safety for the
valuable records of the county, its courts and officials.
When the court house was finished it was not properly divided, in regard
to rooms, and with the passing of years improvements in the floors, etc., were
found necessary for the comfort and convenience of those connected with the
offices and courts, so, in 1909, the county commissioners wisely decided to
expend not to exceed ten thousand dollars in such repairs and changes as
were needed. The work is now in progress.
The years have passed, and the minutes and hours that have made up
the days and months have been ticked off and truly noted by a “city clock”
which hangs in the high tower of this court house, the bell attached thereto
being one of unusually clear and musical tone.
WAYNE COUNTY JAILS.
While, as a general rule, the citizens of this section of Ohio have been
law-abiding people, yet, in common with all other counties, there has from
the first been a pressing demand for some safe place in which to keep offend-
ers of the law from escaping before final trials, and hence the jail has always
been numbered among the necessities of the county. The first jail built by
this county was situated on lot No. 57, and was purchased by the commis-
sioners of John Bever for the sum of two hundred dollars. Bids were had
for the construction of a jail, July 13, 1816, and the lowest responsible bidder
was Benjamin Jones, who contracted with the county to erect one for one
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thousand three hundred and eleven dollars. He furnished the required bond
and complied With the following terms :
“The building to be so far completed as to have room No. 2, east of the
entrance and hall, finished in every respect on or before the 1st day of
January, 1817, and to give the commissioners, Oliver Jones, Samuel Mitchell
and Robert McClaran, possession of said room by that day; the balance of
the building to be completed before the 1st day of May, 1817. One-third
of the amount to be paid on the execution of the contractor’s bond; one-
third to be paid when room No. 2 is completed, and the remaining installment
three months after the completion of the job.”
The records show that on August 7, 1817, the commissioners accepted
the finished jail as having been constructed according to contract. The
building was constructed chiefly of timbers taken from the old block-house,
called “Fort Stidger,” erected by General Stidger, of Canton. It may not
be lacking in interest to more minutely describe this pioneer jail. It was
twenty-six feet outside of the walls each way, and was forty feet from the
northwest corner of the lot. Its foundations were of “good stone” laid in
good lime mortar. The floor was of oak timber, laid on sleepers of sufficient
size and number. It was one story high, eleven feet between floor and ceiling,
the walls being of hewed timber not less than eight inches square and notched
together at the corners, “so as to be strong and close.” In some of the rooms
the logs were doubled. Over the entire interior was laid a floor eight inches
thick, made from hewed logs. The eaves were boxed with plain boxing, the
gable ends weather-boarded, and the whole was covered with a shingle roof.
It contained four door frames, of good and sufficient size to make it secure,
“fitted to the ends of the logs that were cut off,” and was “well spiked with
at least four good and sufficient spikes,” not less than three-quarters of an
inch square. It had “four good and sufficient doors, planed and plowed, of
two-inch stuff, or of such stuff as would make the doors four inches thick.”
The boards were put across each other, and made with at least four “good
and sufficient iron straps to run lengthwise of the door, and at the base four
straps of the same kind.” The doors were hung with three “good and suffi-
cient iron straps and hooks to each, of sufficient strength to make it secure.”
Each door had a good strong lock on the inside and on the outside, “the doors
to the entry having a double set of iron bars.”
The building contained a hall and three rooms, marked Nos. 1, 2 and 3.
The lower floor was laid with oak plank, planed and grooved, well nailed
down. The rooms were lined on each side and overhead, with “dry two-inch
plank.” Rooms 2 and 3 were well covered with a “good coat of coarse sand
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
and small gravel well beat in, so as to fill each crevice between the logs and
then it had a good coat of lime mortar plastered over it.”
Such is the description of the commissioners who entered into contract
with the builder, to furnish a good jail for Wayne county, and from the
wording, it appears that all was “good and sufficiently” constructed.
It is believed that the first prisoner to be lodged within the oaken walls
of the “sufficient” jail was one Thomas Porter, “a prisoner who had escaped
from jail and other service,” as he was advertised by Joseph Barkdull. He
was confined here as early as 1818.
A “jailor's house” was built in 1824, adjoining the jail just mentioned.
The second jail of the county was known as the “Stone Jail” and was
built in 1839 by O. Boughton. It was a solid, dungeon-like building, in
which were incarcerated many of the Wayne county and Wooster offenders
of the laws of the commonwealth. It was burned December 18, 1863,
during the Civil war period, Sheriff Wilson, the then official incumbent,
occupying it. At the date of the fire there were confined in it a boy (John
Bowers), and Isaac Wiler for attempting to kill his wife.
The next jail was built on the northwest comer of North Walnut and
North streets, and was counted among the finest jails in Ohio, when it was
erected in the early seventies. It was built of both brick and stone, and cost
a large sum of money.
OLD AND NEW COUNTY OFFICE BUILDINGS.
Aside from the court house and jail, there have also been other county
buildings for the use of the county officials. These are now spoken of as the
“old” and the “new” county buildings. The first set of these offices came
about in the following manner:
Friday, March 27, 1829, a year or so after the burning of the old court
house, a special session of the county commissioners was held, the commis-
sioners then being Stephen Coe, Jacob Ihrig and Abram Ecker, who met
for the purpose of making some provisions for the erection of public build-
ings. It was resolved by the board “to erect on the northwest corner of the
public square, in the town of Wooster, four substantial fire-proof offices of
such dimensions as may hereafter be agreed upon.” The auditor of the
county was authorized to “give notice by advertisement in the Republican-
Advocate and by getting hand-bills struck and circulated.”
April 24th, the same year, the commissioners met in the public square
of Wooster, between ten and four o'clock and offered the contract at public
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auction, Daniel Miller appearing as the lowest bidder; but the commissioners,
upon consultation, concluded that he was not a suitable person to award the
contract to and adjourned the session until the next morning, when the
contract was let to Calvin Hobart. The buildings were of brick and stone;
were seventy-two and a half feet in length, with walls eight and a half feet
high between the foundation and the commencement of the arches. The
contractor obligated himself to have the building completed by December 1,
1829, and for such work he was to receive the sum of nine hundred eighty-
nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. The brick from the walls of the old
court house (burned in 1828) were appropriated in these buildings.
This office building served well the purpose for which it had been con-
structed until the close of the Civil war, when more and better office accom-
modations were demanded by the prosperous, growing county. The “new’'
county building, that accommodates the present offices of the county, stands
adjoining to the court house proper, to the west on Market street. The
structure is built of stone, brick and iron, solidly and massively constructed,
and is ample in room and appliances for the present needs of the county.
The first floor is devoted to the offices of the county treasurer, auditor,
recorder, surveyor and county commissioners; the second floor was planned
for the accommodation of the probate judge, clerk and sheriff. The laying
of the corner stone was an occasion of great rejoicing and speeches were
delivered by Hon. George Bliss and others. The date of building this
structure was 1866.
As viewed by a stranger today, this building seems to be but a wing of
the court house proper, and from its fine state of preservation one would
conclude that it was a part of the original building, notwithstanding the
court house is built of stone, while the office building is a compound of brick,
stone and iron. This building is still in use (1909) and, from its excellent
style of building, seems almost like a modern-built structure.
THE COUNTY INFIRMARY.
The citizens of Wayne county have always been a liberal minded and
truly charitable people. They have never encouraged idleness, but have ever
provided for the poor and unfortunate subjects within its borders. Prior
to the adoption of the state constitution of 1852. the paupers of Wayne
county were cared for by the various townships, as best they could be by
the commissioners and township trustees, but upon the passage of this consti-
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tution, and at the first session of the board of county directors, held July 24,
1852, the Wayne county infirmary was located two miles east of Wooster.
The original builder of this institution was Simon Christine, and Dr. S.
Pixley, of Wooster, was the first physician in charge. The original building
was a three-story structure, the basement being of stone, while the super-
structure was of brick. It contains one hundred rooms and the entire build-
ing is heated with hot air. Cyrus Senger was appointed the first superin-
tendent, and served until 1858, when A. R. Sweeney was appointed, and
served many years.
The official report of this county institution for 1876 showed the admis-
sion of forty-nine paupers during that year, with ninety-seven other paupers
supported by other means, at a total cost of eight thousand and forty-three
dollars, or amounting to a cost of seventeen cents per day for each one
cared for. Connected with the infirmary, there was originally two hundred
and eighty acres of land which helps to sustain the institution.
Of the present standing of this benevolent institution let it be said that
the last annual (1909) report shows that there were fifty-two inmates —
thirty-two men and twenty women. The total value of property, as per
invoice just taken, is sixty-nine thousand five hundred dollars. The total ex-
penditures for the last fiscial year was nine thousand six hundred and eighty-
nine dollars, including a fire escape costing five hundred and sixty-nine dollars.
THE CHILDREN'S HOME.
Not unmindful of the unfortunate children of the county, as early as
July, 1881, steps were taken for the securing of land and the erection of
proper buildings to care for the children without suitable homes of their
own. The county commissioners issued bonds and purchased eighty-two and
a fourth acres of valuable land in section 28 of Wayne township, about two
miles from the city of Wooster, for which they paid the sum of twelve thou-
sand two hundred and fifty dollars to E. Baum, the deed of which was
recorded July 7, 1881. There suitable buildings were soon erected and today
this humane institution is the pride of Wayne county among those who see
the goodness in thus caring for the poor children in their midst. The last
quarterly report shows that this home had in its care and safe keeping forty-
two children. The total cost of keeping them for this quarter was one thou-
sand eight hundred and forty-seven dollars, or forty-three dollars per child
for the quarter. W. E. Jarvis is the careful superintendent at this date.
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October, 1909. With plenty of good land to till and plenty of excellent,
wholesome food, and proper training, these children will ere long grow to
men and women of usefulness and not find their way into vice and crime.
PROPERTY VALUATION OF COUNTY.
The subjoined is a list of the valuations in the various townships and
villages and cities in Wayne county, for the year ending August
1, 1908:
Baughman township. .
... $1,347,803
Saltcreek township
$ 620,797
Chippewa township. .
. 1,045,816
Wavne township
1.441.715
Canaan township. . . .
870,486
Wooster township
1.037.905
Congress township. . .
836,033
Wooster City
. 2,550,000
Chester township
• • 1.050.359
Fredericksburg Village.
101,691
Clinton township. . . .
878,380
Applecreek Village. . . .
157,122
East Union township.
947.399
Creston Village
333.828
Franklin township. . .
. 1,012,507
Mt. Eaton Village
67,055
Green township
.. 1.688,347
Dalton Village
184.225
Milton township
. 1,325,580
Orrville Town
370,000
Paint township
750,004
Marshallville Village. . .
129,000
Plain township
.. 1,003.360
Doylestown Village. ... .
268,000
Sugarcreek township.
■ • 1.259.577
•
Grand total
of valuation in
county
$24,374,153
(9)
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CHAPTER VIII.
CIVIL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY.
By Hon. L. R. Critchfleld, Sr.
PREFACE.
We read with curiosity the histories with which it has been sought to
perpetuate some memory of man. Rollin has condensed the history of the
ancient world; Grote has given us the history of Greece; Livy and Gibbon
the history of the Roman empire. We read Hallam’s Middle Ages, and
Guizot’s Civilization, Hume and Macaulay, Prescott’s Peru and Mexico, the
life of Washington, the history of the United States, the modern histories of
Asia and Africa; but the world has no history of the masses of mankind. It
is only by the mental effort called “faith” that we know that the common
people of the world were like ourselves; that they lived and labored, loved,
and perished as we do. Even in our own day we celebrate the birth of
Washington, the greatness of Jackson; we have non-partisan Lincoln clubs
to keep alive the memory of the lamented martyr; but what of the dead, the
heroes in common life, the faithful guardians of self government? The age
is breaking this immortal solitude. Family reunions are resurrecting the
old fathers and mothers; yearly gatherings are extricating ancient virtue
from the mould of the wilderness, and a new heart is throbbing loud enough
to stir the dust of the pioneers. That toe have constructed this magnificent
era, is no longer thought by the reflecting man and we are beginning to
confess in books the grandeur of the great actors of the past!
Of the very foremost, Wayne county is keeping these records of grati-
tude. An elaborate history of Wayne county, some thirty years ago, came
from the toilsome genius of Ben Douglas; but the age is advanced in spirit-
ual conception, the rude necessities that clothed the early fathers and mothers
must give place to that mystic robe that adorned the visits of Gabriel, and
amidst the clouds that habited the early settlements, the pure and splendid
virtues of the pioneer must blaze like the morning star. As a sign of individ-
ual royalty a chain of gold must be thrown about the necks of these heroes
of self government! It is to the man of common life, the king of the
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wilderness, the nobleman of the log cabin, and the man that caught their
mantle, that the better history commemorates. The New History of Wayne
County is the history of men and women and children and their civil and
political agency in the formation of government. To this subject, the writer
has contributed the following pages. Strictly non-partisan, the words
“republican” or “democratic” have reference to form of government, and
not to parties; and whatever of party politics intervened in the great work of
the fathers, the differences but enlarged that intellectual force necessary for
greater objects. Constantly feeling the inclination to record more of the
names of the prominent men that honored Wayne county by their patriotism
and ability, the limits of the article, and the probable details of the history,
were a restriction to the more ample record.
To raise the inference that some of our ideas of individual independence,
and American courage, that defies a world in arms, and some principles of
government, may have been, possibly, influenced by colonial association with
the Indians for two hundred years, and their defiance of a higher civilization,
and stubborn retreat before a superior foe, that portion of the article on
“Indian Government” is presented. That the Indian was a great barbaric
man, intellectual, eloquent, and savage, our early history illustrates.
To give the high origin of the early settlers of Wayne county, their
character, their social purity and patriotism, the influences that perfected
their vigilance for free institutions, the grandest of all labors that they per-
formed in government in the Northwest, the practical and glorious results
that have immortalized their early struggles, and their example as followed
by their descendants, seemed to the writer an appropriate method of ampli-
fying the subject.
The civilization of the new states of the Northwest, and the renown
of the pioneers, are attributable to a great ancestry.
The highest and most symmetrical system of government is at once
suggested by even a superficial view of the form and character of our na-
tional and state constitutions; they involve the perfection of intellectual and
moral development and the presence of a sublime spirit. All antiquity was
measured in this constitutional system to obtain the finish of a magnificent
monument of government with surer foundations and more scientifically sus-
taining arches than had been conceived in the history of nations. It was
true, and it was also a commonplace, and all Americans knew it, before it
was uttered by the lips of Pitt and Burke, that all history might be searched,
and the men of the Revolution were the learned and greatest men of the
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world! It would be a prolixity, in eulogy, to name the immortal patriots
that gathered about the cradle of liberty, and offered devotion, and gifts of
rhetoric, and wisdom, to the young goddess of the Revolution!
There is not only symmetry in form, but logic and power, in the ex-
pression and action of the three great divisions of government, federal, state
and the reserved power of the people. The general poverty and virtue of
the Revolutionary era was the frame about the splendid picture, a picture hung
upon the heavens for the world to look at ! The spirit of the system an-
nounced the sublime expectation uf the supreme, commanding force of popular
action; and the people, in the marvelous impulses of patriotic sensibility of
that era, started the machinery of liberty.
The first of the great concerns of practical government was the unity
of empire. Colonial claims extended from the silvery beaches of the Atlantic
to beyond the limits of the Elysian fields of Hiawatha. Wrestling with the
jealousies of colonial priority to obtain these boundless domains conveyed by
the charters of the virgin Queen, and the Charleses, and the Jameses and
the Georges, was a not less heroic labor than the bloody diplomacy of
acquiring the vast possessions of the Indian nations. The achievement gave
to the new republic the hills, and the rivers and the valleys, through whose
picturesque gateway civilization passed into the new world of the West.
EDUCATION.
Of education, the opportunities lay at the foundation of the republican
superstructure. The public gifts of lands by Congress to the states for the
schools, the dedication of the interest from perpetual trust funds arising from
the sales of the lands by the constitutions of Ohio of 1802 and 1851 attest
the genius of our fathers. The old “School Section Sixteen’’ is one of the
romances of our western civilization, but a romance in real life, for the
states of the Union now expend for education twice as much as Great Britain,
three times as much as France, five times as much as Germany, eight times
as much as Austria, and ten times as much as Italy.
THE REVOLUTIONARY PURPOSE.
Essential to the preservation of a complex system of free government,
the peculiar characteristics of revolutionary purpose were to build up political
levels and achieve the altitudes of personal life.
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In our history is a somewhat wonderful, ethical phenomena. The heroic
fever of the Revolution consumed colonial caste, and the new man, the great
commoner, appeared. Our Revolution developed the brotherhood of man.
The magnificent postulate of the commoners of the republic was a political
and legal equality of the people; the eternal philosophical truth of the great
system of constitutional liberty. Predominant in the colonies, European
caste degraded the commonalty by its haughty glance of patronizing benevo-
lence. The farmer, the laborer, struggling with poverty, unadorned with
imported ornament, unwelcome to the fetes of the aristocrats, contrasted
greatly with the ruffled shirts, golden shoe buckles and powdered hair,
the stately processions, the wealth, and the courtly pomp and refinement of
the lord of the manor; but fashion faded in the great solicitudes of indepen-
dence and the revolutionist was born in the wonderful contrasts of social
life; and the tradesman, the merchant, the self-assertive professions, the
school-man of New England and of the South, the people, arose in voluntary
majesty to the comprehension of the value of man. The divine purpose
had intercepted the young surveyor of the Alleghanies, and Washington be-
came the immortal commoner of every age. He drew to his bosom the
young Hamilton, and Greene, and Knox, and Schuyler, and Morris, and
other great lieutenants, and the thought of a continent was transformed.
The great commoner thought uncommonly in the philosophy of human
rights. Franklin and Jefferson, Otis and Adams, Henry and Morris; then
Marshall and Jay and Webster, Wright, Benton and Clay, in a chorus of
eloquence, aroused the world to the beauty of free institutions. The great
republican commoner is the hero of the great principles of our Magna
Charta; the Indian chief gazed long at his footsteps in the Northwest.
THE CONSTITUTION.
The Constitution of the United States arises in a very lofty originality;
above the King John charter extorted by, and for, the barons on a memorable
day! The principles of legal government in the states of England were a
mosaic variety of common precedents, hut only in name a prototype of the
great system of the constitution of the United States. Dark medieval
shadows confused the legal systems of Briton, Saxon and Norman; nor do
Greece or Rome, or the states of its fallen empire, embellish any paragraph
of our great constitution. It stands alone in original, solitary grandeur!
There is a delicacy of mental and moral touch in its application and execution,
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and there has grown around this popular system a literature of interpretation,
a common law, created by the superintending vigilance of the popular judg-
ment.
Statesmanship is that science that can anatomize the intellectual and moral
throbs of the great people of America. Of popular progress, the Consti-
tution was invested with the intention — Liberty should unseat the king!
The magnificent face of men and women of American production should
invoke the admiration of the globe. The political literature of presidents,
and courts, senates and congresses, the taste, the dramatic power, was to
outstrip all traditional civilization!
No human artist can wield such a sword of the spirit as will dissect
American influence in the subtle transformations of the world’s barbaric in-
stincts. Without the presence of these great men and this constitution,
Wayne county would be a political myth.
THE FOUNDERS OF GOVERNMENT IN THE NORTHWEST.
Scarcely had the great ordinance of 1787 and the Constitution of the
United States electrified the people of the old confederacy with the con-
sciousness of national life, than the star of empire took its way to the north-
western wilderness. The genius of new states followed the star, and there
began to pour into the happy valleys of Ohio, and along the sandy dunes
of the northern lakes, the unique and splendid thinkers of the revolution.
Uprising like an aurora upon the summits of the Alleghanies appeared the
mighty school master, and the teaching clergyman, the artist, the surveyor,
the hero, the soldier from the Indian frontier, the statesman from the con-
federate congress, the legislator, the constitution maker, the physician, the
lawyer, the laborer; and likewise there came the mother of heroic offspring;
all cutting their way through roadless forests, rafting the streams, and fixing
their tents in nature’s solitude. Not only of men and women, — it was the im-
migration of principles, the spiritual light of a new empire was marching
with them, and the great flashing eye of civilization confronted the savage
and drove him back among the shadows of the forest. Forms of govern-
ment began to methodize the inorganic state; religion, too, spread her divine
wings over the solitude and intoned her songs with the birds of the woods;
an exceptional race was seen whose intellectual face and beaming eyes soon
mingled their illumination with the brilliant scenes of the northwestern
morning! The beautiful face of the American, the inviolability of virtue,
were commencing their enchantment, but amidst the indescribable dangers
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that lurked in savage life. The Revolutionary war had not ceased, but con-
tinued in dangerous hostility for nearly thirty years. Obliged by the treaty
of 1783 to deliver up the western posts, Great Britain, under pretext of
American violation of the treaty, had refused, and had British troops still
in the posts in 1812; its Indian allies were incited to deeds of blood; canoes
of savages were on the rivers; Indians traversed the county; their wigwams
were in the woods; predatory bands murdered the inhabitants; Tecumseh
had organized the Indian nations; battles were fought; Indian revenge glutted
its savagery as it slowly retreated; Indian titles were purchased, and safety
secured for our people only long after the treaty of peace with Great Britain
in 1815, and after British power was extinguished at the battle of New
Orleans. Attracted to the territory of the Northwest, as the gift of Virginia
to the general government, many of the early settlers of Wayne county were
from that noble state, possessed of the sublime composure, determined will
and personal courage that were a part of the education of the southern man
and woman, and in the danger about their new homes, and in the war of
1812, this southern manhood and womanhood fearlessly met and conquered,
not for a day, but for years, the difficulties of primeval nature. From
Maryland were many others, and from every eastern and middle state came
the founders of government. Amidst this splendid noontide of Wayne
county, now embellished by art and education, we can truly behold the great
men and women and the great crisis of 1796. A future of prophecy ! The
revelation of the Constitution of the United States was brooding over the
wilderness ; only probabilities, and the visionary beauty of the manhood and
womanhood of the West, was in its embrace. Angels were fluttering among
the trees ! Study has been given to these great men !
Noted in Roman history is Myron’s celebrated statue of the heifer, as
being so fine a manifestation of sculpture that the butchers of the stalls about
the Forum had difficulty in preventing their cattle from circling around and
around the statue, to catch her marbled breath and the lambent light of her
crystalline eye. So the impulses of the writer upon a higher plane and to a
nobler object, circle around and around these statues of the pioneers that
history has sculptured into divine expression.
That the ancients made demigods of their heroes; that the Chinese
worship their ancestors: that the Roman soldier was the conqueror of the
world, bearing the urn that contained the ashes of his father, — is it a wonder?
The superstition of loving our fathers is an hereditary virtue. Interpreta-
tion of fine principles and heroic deeds, is character. Of our heritage, the
sublimest possession is the character of the pioneers of government. Liberty
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was then only a beautiful song, an ecstacy, a hope, an ideal goddess, an eagle
upon her hand with wings of gold; our ancestors threw the stars about her
divine form. The lion slumbering in the revolutionary heart was ready to
spring upon the world. He might have had his huge limbs and lofty head
bound down by the multiplied webs of ancient systems; our powers might
have become atrophied by disuse; they *were made glorious. It was a
magnificent drama of an early world!
On occasion of a pioneer picnic several years ago, at Highland park,
my remarks were directed to the subject of the “Pioneer Mothers,” and the
gratification of the audience was a eulogy upon that noble character of the
early founders of our institutions. Hopeful, patient, alert, prophetic, using
the rifle, fearless, largely anxious in daily ministrations, fierce as a female
lion over her young, the pioneer mother was advancing civilization, and
erecting that imperishable monument that will never cease to proclaim the
virtue and glory of our country !
Such was the sublime character of the founders of the first of new
states; a new nation covered with wounds, and pulsating with the blood of
liberty behind them; an uncreated empire of untold magnificence before
them. With prudent and reflective energy we commenced our great career.
It was a "watchful and wary ingress into dangers and savage life: the meas-
ured and steady progress of law, amidst the claws of the bear and the jealous
tomahawk of the Indian.
No settlement had been made in this new domain until April, 1788, when
forty-six immigrants arrived at the mouth of the Muskingum river. No
constituted authority being there, Return Jonathan Meigs drew up a code
of rules, on a sheet of foolscap, and tacked them to a large oak tree. Fol-
lowing up the Muskingum and its tributaries, immigration made settle-
ments towards the north: but it was not until 1806 that William Larwill,
and in 1807 Joseph and John Larwill. his brothers, settled in Wayne county,
John Bever being then engaged in surveying the sections of the county. The
interminable exodus from the East then flowed, and formed the great popula-
tion of the Northwest !
The interesting and significant fact is that law was tacked up on an
oak! It was to be an empire of law!
INDIAN GOVERNMENT.
With nations of Indians inhabiting the undefined territory of the old
colonies, the Constitution of the United States became a comprehensive
menace to aboriginal government. As a very ancient people they met Colum-
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bus in the South; they gazed with imperturbable interest on the Pilgrim
Fathers! The tides of the Atlantic, and Pacific, the raging overflow of the
great rivers, invaded their wigwams in every part of North America; and
it is a favorite impression of the writer that they had a system of govern-
ment. To the nationalities that the Romans found in Gaul, several centuries
before the Christian era, the aborigines of America bear resemblance. Formed
of families were tribes, and of these the nation, and of the masses of the
tribes and of the chieftains the general assembly was formed. Of self-govern-
ment the Indian system was conspicuous. Recognizing the inter-Indian obliga-
tions, but without permanent confederation, the Indian nations stood, solitary
and alone, without international relations, in military dictatorship without the
laws of war, and confronted by modern systems of civilization which they re-
jected in time of peace. To the world they were mere Arabs in an American
wilderness. But they had a local government. The chiefs of the tribes
were selected by the tribes, and of the nations by the tribes, and, as of all
other nations, the most celebrated for their courage, endurance and intelli-
gence were elevated to the position of leaders, and they were as absolute
military dictators as are known in every regular army. Divided into dif-
ferent nations, war was common among them and with the different European
powers who contested territorial rights in the colonial period, and with the
United States. Treaties and alliances among themselves and wjth the French,
the British and Americans were frequent in the various contests of inter-
national policy, and in our Northwest, in the battle of Tippecanoe, their
great leader, Tecumseh, illustrated the union of Indian nations with the
British. To have no permanent federal center, or capital, was incident to
the Indian claims of vast possessions, and to the tribal excursions to the
distant limits of their territory, apparently to maintain their possessory
right to their hereditary domains. In all their negotiations for the sale of
their lands, the terms and conditions, and their policy, were first considered
and voted on by the Indian nations, and their leaders were selected and in-
structed as plenipotentiaries in national form, to the meetings with American
national commissioners. To call the attention of the government to a vio-
lation of treaties, frequent embassies of the dignified denizens of the forest
appeared at Washington, and their accomplishments excited the wonder of
our national authorities.
The strict observance of the marriage vow among the Indians was a
family virtue. Their religion was a direct relation to the Great Spirit whom
they worshipped. They believed in the future life. Their medicine man
was their priest, and he invoked the divine healing power to cure disease.
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The antiquity of this belief, and the Indian idea of the inferiority of the
female, give probability to the supposition of his descent from some ancient
race of people; as do also the agricultural department of Indian life, which,
together with the common drudgery of the family, was conducted by the
female. The disinclination of the Indian to any labor except hunting and
fishing and war, his frequent change of location, his habits of cruelty, classed
him as a relic of barbarism. With much like the ceremony of knighthood,
in the Middle ages, the youthful Indian was equipped as a warrior. De-
based by ignoble passions, yet in bravery, in resenting a supposed wrong, in
his slow retreat before superior forces, the Indian was possessed of the ele-
ment of chivalry, and stands as a proud, self-governing, revengeful bar-
barian; and as *we see him pictured, he is the most skillful, graceful and
splendid horseman upon the American prairies. In vanity of ornament of
himself and horse, he might well have been ranked as a knight of the Cru-
sades, or that composite being of horse and man that surprised the Mexican
on the invasion of Cortez!
Indolent in time of peace; painting the body, wearing the skins of
animals, expert in the movements of infantry and cavalry in time of war,
with the warwhoop to encourage the attack; with weird songs and crude
poetry, their only records; these the editors of Tacitus continually compare with
the early Gaul. The tomahawk was a Gaulish weapon. Marius, in his
great battles with the Cimbri, fought the same race that were destroyed by
Harrison and Wayne in this great Northwest. Government of the Indian
respected right of property and person, punished crimes, and promoted peace
if not attacked in person or property. The high physical development of
the Indian, his Roman nose and high cheek bones were Gaulish, and in
the Persian, the Indian may trace his ancestry. The vast territory of the
Northwest was claimed by the Indian as his heritage, and the international
law of title by discovery and prescription was as ably reasoned by the Indian
orators as by the supposed more civilized usurpers of Europe. Before our
fathers, some Indian tribes had been settled for fifty years in what is now
the state of Ohio; and, with a remarkable humanity, the Congress of the
United States provided in the ordinance of 1787 that “the utmost good faith
shall always be observed towards the Indians ; their lands and property shall
never be taken from them without their consent.” The United States ob-
tained possession of their lands on the Muskingum river as early as 1795,
and between 1784 and 1805 some five treaties were made between the United
States and various tribes of Indians, quieting their title to certain lands in
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the Northwest, which the government afterwards purchased, and in 1842
the last possession of the Indians terminated in Ohio.
The most dramatic and picturesque scenes ever witnessed were the oc-
casions of the meeting of the commissioners of the United States and the
Indian chiefs, to define boundaries and purchase Indian lands. Treaties at
Fort Stanwix in 1784; at Fort McIntosh in 1785; at Fort Finney in 1786;
at Fort Harmar in 1789; at Greenville in 1795; at Fort Industry in 1805,
with many able representatives of the government, including General St.
Clair and General Wayne, and with the chiefs of eleven of the most power-
ful tribes of Indians of the Northwest, were as brilliantly conducted as the
modern meetings of the peace congress, amidst the splendid architecture and
display of the capital of the Netherlands!
The more magnificent palaces of the stately oaks, the rivers sparkling,
nature's parks of 'wild animals gathering about in the shadows; the con-
certs of the birds, the native dignity of the Indian chiefs, with that silent
gravity that told of the approaching migration to distant lands; their splendid
dress of doe skin, its fringes musical with the claws of the bear and with
the teeth of the wolf, and above that sombre and silent face, that had been
bronzed in yellow by the Master Hand of untold centuries, ’were waving
plumes, that proclaimed the majesty of nature and native art, the exalted
denizen, whose warwhoop answered the victorious scream of the eagle, whose
feathers adorned him, — the tall, ornamented and thoughtful negotiator!
To intensify these great occasions was the presence of the government
of the United States, in the continental dress of one of the heroes of the
Revolution and but lately conqueror of the Indians at the battle of Fort
Defiance, the immortal Major-Gen. Anthony Wayne, and this great man
gazed calmly into the eyes of Corn Planter, and Red Jacket, and Little Turtle,
and they yielded to inevitable destiny; and at the treaty of Greenville, ac-
complished by General Wayne, peace was established and the lands of the
Northwest obtained for the population of the new states.
For negotiating treaties, for intellectual acumen, for embellished oratory,
the Indian representatives ranked among the classical speakers of antiquity;
but in his fine and majestic appearance there was a decadent chivalry, and
an undertone that we hear in the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill. How-
ever, he was wise in selling cheaply a doubtful title, and in reserving, as it
appeared to him, his still independent and proud seclusion among the ma-
jestic scenery of another west.
Coursing through Wayne county were many trails of this nervous and
uneasy race, traveling to and fro from east to west, and west to east, in
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fragmentary 'weakness; with a village for a period near the junction of Buck-
eye and Madison streets, they were in amity with the early settlers, and dis-
appeared in the progressive pressure of irresistible immigration. Their path-
way was marked by the spasmodic desolation of revenge, largely incited by
a British administration and emulated by a British soldiery. To their natural
passions, inflamed by the desperation of inferior resistance, were added the
European and Asiatic methods of extermination, of which history grows
atrocious in the civil wars across the oceans. Of notice of danger to the
pioneers from Indian attack, there were many magnanimous examples of
Indian friendship. At that day the atmosphere of political life was burdened
with the sighs of the Spanish inquisition, or the slavery, mutilation and
murder of prisoners of war. Massacres of Wyoming, or of St. Clair’s de-
feat, scarcely equalled the bloody dignity of the slaughter in the Nether-
lands. or in the civil wars of England. Now but a reminiscence, many of
the principles of Indian justice and equity insensibly became an element in
the common law of our great Northwest.
The philosophy of the Indian sensibilities developed a rare exhibition
on the great stage of nature; the love of home, of territorial supremacy, of
the picturesque hills, of the perspective valleys, and of their amphitheatres of
forest and flower, of color and odor, of wild animal and ambuscade, gave to
the Indian the highest action of the sensibilities, and the imminency of their
loss, by the inevitable approach of the immigrant, aroused a passion that
clothed many of the beautiful scenes of the West with the skeletons of the
Indian and of the victims of Indian atrocity. His existence, and national
life, and primitive government, are but a tragic romance in civil and political
life; an unique curiosity in the history of nations.
One of the greatest novelties in all history is the Indian in America!
And among the early settlers of Wayne county! Of his characteristics, his
insatiate cruelty ranked him with the early and bloody struggles of the human
race ; his cruelties in the Revolution have no sanction in the laws of modern
warfare, and his evil passions had the fixed habit of inhuman and merciless
revenge. Against the invader he was a monster, with a high development
of intellectual power. Of George III, of Lord North, and of the British
Parliament, the Indian was the bloody instrument; associated, too, with the
Hessian, 'whose rivalry in cruelty, and its British instigation, confound the
thought of several centuries of moral progress. Of the disordered sensi-
bilities of several thousand years, the savagery of the Indian is an evolution.
The humanity with which he was considered in the ordinance of 1787, and
in his association with the pioneers, is a pleasant reflection; and in our love
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cf free government the history of ideas might find some political assimila-
tion in two hundred years of colonial and Indian association; our love of
liberty may insensibly be the partial reflection of that proud and life-sacri-
ficing passion of independence that accompanied this native American into
the shadows of the setting sun!
ORGANIZED GOVERNMENT IN WAYNE COUNTY.
Divided by the ordinance of 1787 into three great territorial divisions,
Hamilton, Washington and Wayne, the great dominion of the latter em-
braced northern and northwestern Ohio, including the territory of which was
formed the states of Michigan and Indiana and parts of Illinois and Wis-
consin ; and, but for the crack of the rifle of a few daring white men, and the
warwhoop of the Indian, it was an empire of silence. Aboriginal government,
the tribe and its chief, alone disturbed the solitude. The eagle’s feather was
the only emblem of sovereignty ; conscience the only lawgiver of the pioneer,
and it was the spirit of the great ordinance. It was then true, as Aristotle
said over two thousand years ago, that “It is better for a city to be governed
by a good man, than by good laws.” The peaceable acquisition of ter-
ritory, founded upon the recognition of Indian nationality and the equity of
possession, — an acquisition that disclaimed the old world doctrine of title by
discovery or conquest, — established the new political organism upon the
foundations of righteousness, and a government of good men began to appear
in the wilderness.
1. The government of a territorial Council in 1788.
2. The government of a territorial Legislature in 1799.
3. The government of the state in 1802.
As a policy of necessity from sparseness of population, until 1799 the
elective franchise was held in abeyance.
THE TERRITORIAL COUNCIL.
With the government of a Territorial Council in 1788, composed of
Arthur St. Clair as governor, Winthrop Sargent as secretary, and Samuel
H. Parsons, Mitchell Varnum and Return Jonathan Meigs as judges, all
prominent men of the Revolution, meeting at Marietta, organized political
energy began a memorable career. Laws were to be adopted by the gov-
ernor and judges. To reside in the district and be possessed of one thousand
acres of land were the qualifications of the governor. To have five hundred
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acres of land was required of the judges. They were to have common law
jurisdiction. All county and township officers were to be appointed by the
governor. Freedom of religious worship, and the encouragement of schools,
and good faith toward the Indians were guaranteed by the great ordinance.
Habeas corpus, trial by jury, representation, to give bail, judicial proceed-
ings according to the common law, were cardinal doctrines of the congres-
sional charter. Confined to the laws of the original states, the council at its
first session adopted laws establishing a militia, courts, sheriffs, a court
of probate, defining crimes, regulating marriages, creating the office of cor-
oner, and acts of limitation. After ten years, with changes of judges, and many
additional laws, now of common knowledge, the period arrived in 1798 when
the territory contained five thousand free male inhabitants, and a territorial
Legislature was to be elected by the people.
THE TERRITORIAL LEGISLATURE.
The Governor issued his proclamaion for the election of a General As-
sembly to meet at Cincinnati, in February, 1799. The General Assembly
consisted of a House of Representatives, and a Legislative Council of five
members, to be appointed by the President, out of ten names selected by
the House, and met in Cincinnati in September, 1799. Not organized by
the territorial government until 1796, Wayne county did not participate in
the organic advantages of the council; but in 1798 was represented in the
General Assembly by Charles F. Chobert De Joncaire, Solomon Sibley and
Jacob Viscar, all of Detroit; and this Legislature elected William Henry Har-
rison the delegate to Congress and adjourned to meet at Chillicothe in 1800
and again adjourned to 1801-2, and again adjourned until November, 1802,
but never meeting, as in April, 1802, Congress authorized certain portions
of the Northwest to form a state government.
THE EARLY LAWS.
Commencing in 1788 to legislate, the early councils and territorial
legislatures found the necessary legal examples in the states of Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts and Virginia, the homes from which in the main they had
made the great exodus into the wilderness of the Northwest. From these
ample sources a comprehensive body of laws were adopted, such as regulating
the militia, establishing courts, for the appointment of sheriffs, respecting
crimes, marriages, the office of coroner, limitation of times for civil and
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criminal actions, as to the sale of liquor to Indians and soldiers, suppressing
gambling, for dividing the counties into townships, and for the appointment
of constables, overseers of the poor and township clerks, to create the office
of clerk of the Legislature, making the records of the courts of the United
States evidence, as to enclosures of ground, granting licenses to merchants,
traders and tavern keepers, creating the office of treasurer-general and county
treasurers, and as to the manner of raising money, as to highways, public
buildings, prisons, strays, admission of attorneys, guardians, procedure in
civil cases, and as to fees of public officers.
To the common law of Great Britain was added legislation defining the
jurisdiction of the courts and officers to execute process, providing for tax-
ation and a treasurer-general, and county treasurer; organizing the militia;
providing for marriage and divorce; defining crime and criminal and civil
procedure; providing for highways, for the poor, for the creation of town-
ships and counties, and such other legislation as was in the older states ; for
conveyance of real estate; for the settlement of estates, and other probate
jurisdiction; for public buildings, and protection of the right of property and
persons, until, when the constitution of 1802 was adopted, there existed a
body of laws of which the present voluminous statutes are the evolution and
amplification of the exigencies of a growing commonwealth. Of consummate
wisdom and foresight, the structure of the new states Was a magnificent ex-
ception in all the history of government!
That the early legislators were industriously establishing a government
of the people, the acts of the council and territorial Legislature above are
noted as evidences of the popular sovereignty of the times. More con-
clusive evidence of the sovereignty of the people arose between the Legis-
lature and Governor St. Clair in 1800 in the denial of his right to exercise the
veto power, and to lay out and change the boundaries of counties, under the
ordinance of 1787. The contest grew more and more determined and much
legislation was rendered useless. The Governor was afterwards condemned
by. Congress, and the people were confirmed in their resistance to the un-
constitutional attempt of the Governor to interfere with the popular right.
Of this disagreement the memory may have remained, and it may ac-
count for the absence of the veto power in the constitutions of 1802 and
1851.
THE CONSTITUTION OF l802.
Reducing the great county of Wayne in the year 1800, the territory
constituting the state of Indiana was organized with a separate territorial
government. The territorial Legislature not having met in 1802, owing to
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the act of Congress authorizing the eastern section of the Northwest to
form a state, in October, 1802, an election was held for members of the
constitutional convention, which met at Chillicothe in November, 1802, and
adopted a state constitution, and the state of Ohio was recognized by Con-
gress as a state of the Union, in February, 1803. Its first General Assembly
met in March, 1803. A supplementary act of Congress of March, 1803,
made a munificent provision of tracts of land, for the use of schools and
for making roads within the state, limited to certain territory of the three
divisions, by general bearings. Wayne county was diminished by so much
of the original limits as embraced any portion of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin
and Michigan, and was not* approximately bounded until the year 1808, and
controversies arising as to the western and northwestern boundaries of the
new state. Congress ordered a survey of these boundaries by act of May
20, 1812, and in the same year Wayne county was organized under the state
government, with Wooster as the county seat. To the delays incident to
the uncertain boundaries and surveys, Wayne county was not represented
in the constitutional convention of 1802, nor in the state Legislature until
1815. In the constitutional convention of 1851 the county was represented
by John Larwill, Leander Firestone and E. Wilson; and in that of 1872 by
John K. McBride.
Our fathers were the careful architects of the first new state of the
LViion. Slavery existed in all the thirteen states, except in the states of
Massachusetts and Maine, and was, as the ordinance of 1787 would indicate,
in the course of ultimate extinction; the descent of estates was especially
provided for in the great charters of 1787, adverse to the English system,
and the ordinance especially restricted all laws to be made for the North-
west territory to the policy of the laws of the older states, and carefully pre-
served the right of suffrage and self-government, the veto of the governor,
freedom of religious sentiment and worship, the encouragement of schools
and means of education, and a republican form of government.
THE ELECTIVE FRANCHISE OF THE CONSTITUTION OF 1802.
The elective franchise was an important question, both in the territorial
condition of the government of the Northwest and in framing the consti-
tution of 1802. The restrictions on the right to vote were varied in the
different states, but our first constitution provided: To have been in the
state one year, and to have lalxjred on the roads, and to be a white male
person above the age of twenty-one years, were the qualifications of a voter
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The right of suffrage to the negro and, his descendants was decided ad*
versely, as well as his right to hold office. And while the right of suffrage
was broad, by a strange perversity of principle, the exercise of it was lim-
ited. It was a political phenomenon. While this first constitution of the
state provided for the election of senators and representatives to the General
Assembly of the state, for governor, for sheriff and for coroner, and for all
town and township officers ; the secretary of state, state treasurer and state
auditor, the judges of the court of common pleas, consisting of a president
and associate judges, \vith probate jurisdiction, and the judges of the supreme
court, were to be appointed by the joint ballot of the General Assembly; and
the clerks of the court were to be appointed by the respective courts. No
constitutional provision being made for county recorder, auditor, treasurer,
prosecuting attorney, or commissioners, or surveyor, they were afterward
elected by provision of the Legislature as authorized by the constitution. The
resolution to submit the adoption of the constitution of 1802 to the people
was defeated by an almost unanimous vote (twenty-seven to seven) and the
constitution was put into operation by the delegates to the convention; and it
was provided that after the year 1806 another constitutional convention
might be held. As delegates to this convention, were many leading men
both then and in after years ; they were patriots. Of the reasons that operated
to adopt the appointive system as to some of the state and county officers, we
can, perhaps, only surmise that impressions prevailed, especially as to the
courts, that created the judiciary system of the general government. On the
frontier, harassed by Indians in the depredations incident to the war of 1812,
and the war itself, busy to live, our pioneers held no convention after the
year 1806, but the survivors of them, and the generation younger than
them, conscious of the blot of the appointive system on the principle of self-
government, in the constitution of 1851 restored a complete elect-
ive system to the state. Illustrating the popular prudence in
changing the fundamental law, the people refused the constitution of 1872,
and for a period of one hundred and six years, since 1802, excepting some
amendments changing the time and method of voting, and creating the circuit
court, and enlarging the supreme court, have adhered to the first consti-
tution for fifty years, and to the second for sixty.
Kxercising a distinguished influence on this and similar great ques-
tions, the names of many of the ablest men of Ohio, and of Wayne countv,
could be given to ornament these pages.
In the practical application of the great principles of government, it is
not extravagant to say that our fathers outranked all the legislators of the
(10)
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world. They were educated and heroic; lovers of liberty. They were stu-
dents of government, fearless, grand and incorruptible. Wayne county soon
became pre-eminent among the counties of the new state.
Republican government of the state can only be expressed in the legal
terms of county organization, and the county organization in the legal terms
of city, town and township government, and these in the primary legal terms
of the power of the people. The state and county are but ministerial agencies ;
the General Assembly, the supreme and inferior courts are constituent pow-
ers delegated by the people. That the federal and state governments ascend
from the people, and no power descends from the federal and state govern-
ments, both the federal and state constitutions expressly declare. But the
system is inviolable as an organism, and is absolute law. Not only in pass-
ing laws, but in judicial proceedings, the Athenian populace voted by up-
lifted hand ; and in the wards of the city of Rome the people voted by white
and black beans. The senate of Rome were often rebuked by the popular
will. By the usurpation by the emperors of the popular power, Rome fell,
and Athens before the combinations of Philip.
That the civil and political history of Wayne county may be truly ob-
served, we must look to the city, the townships and towns in which original
and initial force always has prevailed.
THE CITY OF WOOSTER.
The first election for city officers after incorporation was in March.
1818. consisting of a president and five trustees, and the board appointed a
marshal, treasurer and collector. By-laws were drafted for the govern-
ment of the board, and ordinances passed for the government of the city.
Wooster, as early as 1814, was called the Athens of northern Ohio. It is
believed by the writer that Wayne county, and Wooster, the county seat, and
the territory known as the backbone of Ohio, had more able and educated
men at that early day than any locality of the Northwest. Beall, Sloane,
Spink, William, Joseph H. and John Larwill, Henry, Bever, the Joneses, the
Robinsons, Stibses, Quinbys, McConahays, Cox. Avery, Sprague, Christmas,
Howards, Clingen, Dean, Lakes, Bissells, Tottens, and a much larger list of*
equally large men are remembered. Mather, a graduate of Yale, was the
first teacher. Surveyors, physicians, lawyers, farmers, educated builders of
state, and mothers, wives, daughters, bright as the stars themselves, were
the heralds of the splendors of the future city and county and the founders
of free institutions. Of the first action of the citv officers as far back as
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1812, having occasion to examine the records, I find their meetings conducted
in full compliance with Jefferson’s manual, and the legal form and character
of ordinances would be approved by any court. For more than eighty years
many of the ordinances for the government of the city have been in force.
Acquainted with the city for many years, and especially the last twenty,
my observation of its order, and respect for law, has impressed me that no
other city in these respects is its superior. With extensive improvements
conducted by the public service for several years, the city is seldom in the
courts. The successful management of its finances, its administration of
justice, and preservation of peace and good order, are evidence of the best
administrative ability. It is a city of law.
The cultivation of taste is a legal sequence in self-government to the
masses of the people. Peace and order, the refining processes of individual
worth, dwell in the temple of the republican heart in a popular system of
government. Splendor is bred in the conceptions and shines in external life.
Houses of lords, patrician caste and private egotism have mistaken a birth
or a fortune for this spiritual dignity. Fine dwellings and ornamental
houses, public improvements, higher education and universal taste; personal
beauty, the magnificent buildings of a university, and its high purposes, the
exceptional opportunities of the city schools; a state agricultural experiment
station, and the manifold forms of its scientific development; manufactures,
merchandizing, have grown into a city of several thousands.
Mental culture is a legal result of a people’s government; long and occult
analysis is born in the primary efforts of political philosophy. The news-
paper. the orator of the pulpit, the teacher, the physician, are metaphysicians ;
the lawyer has struggled in the deceptive meshes of occult legal ideas in all
the history of Wayne county, until a species of brilliancy, a sort of traditional
electric light, illumines the city, from Avery to John McSweeney. whose
unrivaled powers have ranked him among the orators,
“That thundered over Greece,
From Macedon to Artaxerxes’ throne.”
TOWNSHIP AND TOWN GOVERNMENT.
The republican system existed in the individual father and mother. A
great nation in chaotic conception was brooding in the genius of the people.
The home, the township, the county, the state, the nation, were the ascending
series in the development of government, and the surveyor as early as 1807
was defining the sections of land to be the future legal home of the framers
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of government of the Northwest, and between that date and 1825 all the
townships of Wayne county were formed and organized into political bodies.
The forty-six families of the county in 1810, numbering three hundred and
thirty-two, had grown in 1825 to perhaps over two thousand; in 1850 to
thirty-two thousand; in 1870 to thirty-five thousand. Anterior to the very
early period of 1810, the three hundred and thirty-two population of Wayne
county was governed by benevolence and brotherly kindness. Knowing the
laws of the older states, their voluntary righteousness was the common
law of the early rights of property and person; but in the organizing periods
of the townships under the constitution of 1802, the observance of the early
laws of the state became the necessary and paramount obligation. As the
larger responsibilities of representation in the Legislature of the state, in state
officers, in Congress, in the associate judgeships, and in the county offices,
were to be met by the early settlers, the township governments supplied
enlarged intellectual forces. These distinguished forces in township ad-
ministration were the moral and spiritual foundation of a great republic.
They were to observe the public roads, to care for the public schools, for trials
by jury, for a local court, for a religious home, for individual liberty, for
economy, for industry, for self-government; these are in divine harmony
with the highest purpose that ever sanctified a state. The township is the
primary organ of sentiment. Its legal environment the only free system
ever formulated for the defense of human rights! And it but gives clear-
ness to the view of township government when we consider that the then
and present county treasurer, auditor and recorder are county agencies;
that the entire judicial system and its officers is but corrective; that the com-
missioners of the county in that early period, who exercised local adminis-
tration. had but small means and could do but little for the people of the
townships. These early people stood alone amidst the tall oaks of the forests,
the swollen streams, the bridle-paths of the surveys, savage animals, and
the dangers of Indian marauding. But they built roads and bridges; as
overseers, they assisted the poor, they established and maintained justice's
courts and juries; they punished breaches of the peace, and violations of
the rights of persons and property; observed inviolate the rights of suffrage,
and required the strictest accountability of their public officers; they con-
tributed to the public expense by taxation, and required the strictest economy
in public expenditures. Mindful of the constitutional recitals that “religion,
morality and knowledge” are necessary to good government, they early erected
churches and established religious wor ship ; they erected school houses, and
maintained schools by private subscriptions, and had the peculiar advantage
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of that great class of teachers that accompanied the immigration of the early
settlers from the eastern states; and they laid the foundation for that school
system created by the legislation of the state in 1853, formulated by the
senate committee, composed of Harvey Rice, George Rex, of Wayne county,
and Alonzo Cushing. They observed with patriotic care all the provisions
of the bill of rights of the constitution of 1802. Industry pervaded the
townships, and in but a little while Wayne county began its career of
beautiful farms and magnificent productiveness. For a eulogy on the intelli-
gence, dignity and versatility of the early settlers, we find them associate
judges in the court of common pleas, when at an early period the writer
admired the wisdom and integrity of their public services, and which judicial
system continued until the system of the constitution of 1851 Was substituted
in its place. Out of the number of these early statesmen, the county officers
were largely chosen, and so great was the influence of the township leaders
and the special domestic importance of township policy and control of the
county treasury, that the commissioners of the county have almost wholly
been selected from the people of the townships; and one is impressed that
the selection, at an early day, of many of the members of both houses of the
state Legislature, members of Congress, and constitutional conventions, from
the townships, was somewhat precautional for the promotion of the original
principles of our republican system.
An intentional study of the development of township life shows the
early formation of villages, the facilities for exchange of valuable ideas;
the early advantages for education; in many instances, the establishment of
the newspaper; the discussion of the legislative policy, and the fitness of
men for public office ; the best methods of agriculture, and the supplementary
knowledge of the press of the county seat and of the older states ; and I am
led forward from the early struggles of high purpose and republican gov-
ernment to that magnificent present, to the conventions of county and state
exhibitions of agricultural wonders; to the comprehensive systems of edu-
cation ; the high qualification of teachers, and to the personal taste and at-
tainments of the young women and men, that rival all productions of learn-
ing at the county seat. As an inevitable evolution, villages, towns and cities
have modified monarchy. France. England. Germany, nearly the whole
world, have yielded to representation. A financial question has become the
menace to arbitrary power.
Public convenience was a natural organizing incentive to the formation
of villages and towns. The blacksmith, the tailor, the shoemaker, the wagon-
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maker, the carpenter, the merchant, the watch-repairer, the miller, the post-
master, and useful trades and employments required a center as a market;
defined lots, streets, the correction of illegal conduct, and law and its ad-
ministration was necessary, and self-government found its original center in
the village and township. And in the village marshal, trustees and super-
visor of the village; of the justice of the peace; the constable, the township
trustees, we find the beginnings of self-government.
Guizot, in his History of Civilization, and Hallam in his History of the
Middle Ages, the one of France, the other of England, describe with ad-
mirable fidelity the disorders of independent chieftains, barons, earls, defiant
estates, rendering government a continual revolution. Silently, popular life
was developing; villages, towns, cities, for domestic convenience, for foreign
trade at the ports, and local exchange, grew, governed themselves, became
the champions of order, aided the government to obtain the mastery over the
fortified robber and lawless bandit of the large realms in which violence
enslaved the people and debased the state. The foundation of all European
government was force, power usurped by the sword, but the people have
grown into the governing capacity of most of the governments of the world,
and largely within the century just elapsed.
The logic of our splendid system of elective peace, and that the state
is the logical conclusion of the premises of individual freedom, and that the
federal government is the logical conclusion of the premises of state and
popular organizations, — all known as the constitutional system of the United
States, — has pervaded the world. Of this self-governing principle, the col-
onies had no completed practice or publication, and the settlement of the
Northwest, the growth of government from the individual to the state, had
their birth in this Northwest territory, and necessarily, the new counties,
the new state, have generated other states, and the world is in the embrace
of the twro American oceans. The grandest endowments of the age are our
personal freedom and our all-pervading American liberty!
The Christian religion was uttering its voice in the early township,
village and city churches, or even, anterior to these, in the log cabins of the
pioneer. And here are the two sublimities of republican theory, — political
and religious freedom; not voiced by the constitutions of our country solely
to avoid the ignorance and cruelty of the sectarian persecutions of the Middle
ages, the thousand years of blood from the fourth to the fourteenth century,
but that the genius of the people might illumine their pathway in their ascent
to happiness, and inspire them with the wisdom of brotherhood; and that the
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ever present spirit might endow them with the genius of national life! With-
out these conditions, the civil and political history of Wayne county would
be a tinkling cymbal. Wayne county owes its greatness to being an en-
lightened and Christian county!
THE EARLY METHOD OF ENFORCING THE LAW.
It may be observed with justice that a patriotic care governed our early
people in the execution of fundamental law. To our early agencies of govern-
ment we owe a debt of gratitude. The ordinance of 1787 restricted legis-
lation in the Northwest territory to the policy and laws of the older states, and
when the council had violated this provision the laws were instantly vetoed or
repealed. In the execution of the laws passed by the early legislatures, con-
stitutions were strictly construed, and power was exercised by officers from
the highest to the lowest in a respectful manner to avoid infraction of the
rights of person or property. It was the exercise of logic in discrimination
of republican ideas, and these ideas were paramount in legislation primarily
necessary in forming government. They continually prevailed in the ampli-
fication of laws, so that the growth of legislation was of an endogenous char-
acter, covering by broader provisions similar greater necessities. Provisions
for the poor, school systems, roads and highways, taxes, always remained
the same in principle, so that in the constitutions of 1802 and of 1851, while
the larger population and progressive necessities demanded a broader and
more perfect application of principles, the principles Were identical, and not
inimical to the spirit of the government. Enlightenment and conscience, pa-
triotism, directed the execution of law. There was something signally broth-
erly in the motives of the early agencies of the people, and these were a
tremendous force in promoting civil and political government.
PROFESSIONAL INFLUENCES.
Of the wise and tenacious men of the profession in asserting republican
principles in the early days, were the early physicians and lawyers, of the
press and the churches.
Of the physicians, James Townsend was the first in 1811, remaining
thirty years at Wooster; John Cunningham, at Jeromeville in 1830. and from
1848 in Wooster ; Daniel McPhail, in Wooster, in 1818; Edward Thompson,
in 1820. afterward a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal church; Stephen F.
Day, at Wooster in 1827, and remained for thirty-four years; Hezekiah
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Bissell and Samuel N. Bissell, at an early day; Moses Shaffer, first at Mt.
Eaton, and about 1831 removed to Wooster, where he practiced for fifty
years; Leander Firestone, first at Congress in 1841 and removed to Wooster
in 1856; James D. Robinson, resident in Wooster.
Of lawyers who were in Wayne county at an early period was Levi
Cox, in 1815; Edward Avery, in 1817; Ezra Dean, in 1824; Samuel Hemp-
hill, about 1838; John P. Jeffries, in 1836; C. C. Parsons, in 1841; George
Rex, in 1843 ; John McSweeney, in 1845; Ohio F. Jones, in 1846; and the
influence of these representatives and judicial officers and professional men
was incalculably valuable in formulating the methods and carrying out and
preserving the principles of the new government. The republican system
was favorable to the development of plain and democratic methods in the
administration of justice as contrasted with the woolsack and the wig;
physicians became patriots, and great lawyers were allowed the cultivation
of eloquence and political philosophy; the courts and the legislators were,
for the first time, free to modify the common law to accord with the self-
government of the people and the plainer legal rules of action. Having in-
creased in population to thirty-two thousand in 1851, very eminent results
were apparent in the county, in finer buildings, in the facilities of farming,
in conveniences of travel, in education and religious worship, and in the
professions of medicine and law. In the added half century, incalculable
beauty marks the country and the numerous towns and county seat ; a county
infirmary; a children’s home; public buildings suggest expensive philanthropy;
great schools, musical devices, fashion, taste, refinement, beauty, dignity, in-
dependenee, dwell in palatial homes; the county seat has become the most
desirable dwelling place; and in railroads, newspapers, social integrity, and
prosperity, Wayne county stands the meritorious rival of any county in
Ohio.
Of the most eminent forces in asserting the inviolability of the principles
of popular right were the early newspapers, that, after many transformations
of name, yet remain the medium of patriotic influence. From 1817 to the
present time the newspapers of Wooster and Wayne county, in the broader
field of fundamental principles of free government, voiced the patriotism of
the pioneers and their descendants, and informed, encouraged and supported
the intellectual and moral struggle for the great institutions of the North-
west, and for the systems of federal and state constitutions.
For the republican system, the religion of the people of Wayne county
was a powerful influence. W hether in the log cabin, or in God’s first temples
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among the umbrageous shadows of the forest, the Divine Presence was
solacing the pioneer with hope, giving rest to the heavy laden and assurance
of the dignity of his belief in the freedom of man. Churches were being
erected as early as 1812, and church influence has been a magnificent con-
clusion of the righteousness of self-government. In the East they gave in-
spiration to the struggle for independence, in the Northwest they were the
champions of liberty and gave sanctity to the cause of the people.
THE CONSTITUTION OF 1851.
Presumably the constitution of 1851 embraced the best thought of re-
publican government. Rufus P. Ranney, as a leader, is believed to have
been the ablest man in the convention; from Wayne county Leander Fire-
stone and John Larwill and Ezra Wilson were, as non-professionals in legal
study, among the ablest of their class. The convention was thoroughly im-
bued with democratic ideas. Correcting the appointive system of the
constitution of 1802, every office was made elective; much of the constitution
of 1802 was adopted, enlarged upon, and more clearly expressed; additional
offices were created, as lieutenant-governor and attorney-general, a com-
mission of five members to assist the supreme court, state school commis-
sioner, board of public works, sinking fund commissioners, probate court and
comptroller of the treasury. To change the time of holding elections, and
the time of electing officers, amendments were adopted since 1851.
That the federal form of executive, legislative and judicial, is also the
state form of governor, legislature and the supreme court, is worthy of ob-
servation, being closely related to the principles of individual interests, and in
the counties may be observed the legal checks on the closely related county
agencies and the people. As a contrast to the refusal to submit the con-
stitution of 1802 to the vote of the people, the constitution of 1851 was ratified
at the state election in 1851, and the latter constitution provided that all
amendments shall be voted on by the people. With enlargements of the
public agencies, and labors incident to the growth of population, the consti-
tution and laws since 1851 have been a remarkable system of popular en-
couragement ; education alone stands pre-eminent in practical example. The
refinement, the appropriation of invention, the dignity of social life, are
splendidly manifest among the masses of Wayne county. Not the least among
the acquirements of the people of Wayne county was an education in politics,
not only in the law, but in the policy of administration.
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THE INFLUENCE OF PARTY ORGANIZATION AMONG THE PEOPLE.
As to the interpretation of constitutional expression, the conformity of
legislation to fundamental principles, and as to the practical effects of the
exercise of executive power, political parties represent the divergence of pub-
lic thought. They imply intellectual activity in the concerns of government.
That portion of the farewell address of Washington as to parties had
rather a reference to the future than the then present. Much confusion ex-
isted in the public thought at that day as to the effect of constitutional pro-
visions on the rights of the states, much enhanced by Hamilton’s doctrine
of ‘'implied power.” French emissaries formed Jacobin clubs, in antagonism
to the policy of Washington in not forming entangling alliances in the
French and British war. The federalist and republican of that day were
not only in disorganization as to any definite party plans, but their beliefs
were a mosaic of individual and local contradictions. Not until 1828, when
a portion of the people nominated Andrew Jackson for President, and other
portions supported his opponent, were there party organizations, and it is
difficult to find any difference of political views in that contest, except it be
on the immense uncertainty of the meaning of a strict construction of the
constitution! The possibility is hardly historical that the people of the
Northwest were largely influenced by the party questions at Washington,
until the population in the new state of Ohio was augmented to twenty thou-
sand or thirty thousand. That at the county seats politics played some part
in the intellectual and moral action of men of leisure and of the professions,
during and after Jackson's administration, the existence of the county news-
paper. the somewhat advanced methods of communication among the people,
a partial relief from the burdens of clearing the forests, would indicate.
The Missouri Compromise in 1820, the national strife as to the re-chartering
of the Bank of the United States in Jackson's administration; in 1832, the
so-called nullification attempt of South Carolina, the presidential election of
1840, the Mexican war of 1845, aroused the intellectual action of the people,
but not that state of friction of a later period. Relegated to the states of
Southern slavery, the question of the balance of power, of the free and slave
states, grew into discordant controversy all along the highway of national
events. Arrogance threatened dissolution of the Union ; the demand of con-
gressional action in favor of slavery marked the statesmanship of the South-
ern states, and a great moral question involved in the question of slavery
itself inspired in 1854 the creation of the Republican party. The great
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political forces of the Democratic party of the Northern states dissevered their
relation to the unconstitutional claims of slavery, and two of the leading
men of Ohio, Henry B. Payne and George E. Pugh, in the Democratic
national convention at Charleston in i860, repudiated, in the name of the
state of Ohio, the southern claim of constitutional protection to slavery. Now
traversing the whole history of the federal union, public thought was aroused
and became invincible in the Civil war. Wayne county was not the least in
thought and action in this great contest to finally settle the great constitutional
principle of final union. Upon great questions of administration of the fed-
eral government, of state legislation, of county and township interests, the
two great parties have expended thought and action; and intervening with
apparent weakness for many years, a Prohibition party has beheld a popular
conquest of the principle of temperance. In debate, in public oratory, in
newspaper rhetoric, in conscientious thoughtfulness and patriotism, the people
of Wayne county have grown great reasoners in the philosophy of govern-
ment. Critical in the alertness of intellect, party politics has become a
popular science, and in Wayne county the politician has become as gentle
and courteous as ever Plato and his disciples were in the gardens of the
Academy.
THE HEREDITY OF GOVERNING CAPACITY.
One of the valuable thoughts of the occasion is that great governmental
faculties are continued in mental suggestion and heredity. Public force is
propagated by example and emulation; and in the succeeding inflexible ad-
herence to principle, we see the acumen, the high integrity, and unsullied
good breeding of the descendants, or successors, of the early fathers; we
hear in the later orators the eloquence and logic of the early republicans,
and our love of the distinguishing features of a republic is commingled with
the love we bear to the great founders.
Signally illustrative of this heredity was a consciousness of a violation
of the principle of popular elections in the constitution of 1802, when the
reason for the appointive system had ceased in the growth of the population
of the state. The constitution of 1851 asserted the complete system of elective
officers, changed the judicial system, and in the wisdom of revolutionary sug-
gestion enlarged the legislation of the state. The eminence of this adherence
to free government gave an unusual sanction to the principles of 1776.
A patriotic jealousy and watchfulness characterized the early founders
of our local government, and was aroused in 1824 when the alleged com-
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bination of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay defeated the election of
Andrew Jackson to the presidency, as an evasion of the spirit of the consti-
tution and system of government. As the idol of the people, the hero of the
Seminole war, and of the great victory over the British at New Orleans,
Jackson’s cause was almost universally espoused by the brave men and back-
woodsmen of 1815. His after administration was supported by the great
body of the people in all the contests involving supposed principles for which
the Revolution and the war of 1812 were contested. Partisanism does
not seem to have entered into this phase of political history. The then still
living pioneers of the country and the second generation united in adherence
to what >was supposed to be an important principle, and in 1859 there was
instituted a yearly celebration of the 8th of January, which has continued for
fifty years as an offering to the patriotism and political integrity of our
fathers and their attachment to a strict conformity to the republican system.
The solitary munificence of this tribute can be appreciated in the thought
of the exceptional character of the early guardians of constitutional liberty!
The permanency of this unique celebration is associated with the enduring
fame of Washington, and the love of the popular heart for the memory of
Lincoln; these three great Presidents — the one achieving independence and
the adoption of the constitution, the one destroying British influence in
America by the victory at New Orleans, and the incipient rebellion in South
Carolina, the one in magnificent prudence and laborious wisdom giving his
life for the preservation of the Union! Where is the history of their equals?
The organization of to\vnships as now existing in Wayne county was
completed by the year 1825, and their system from the first settlements in
1806 until they had completed township governments was conducted by men
of ability, including many immigrants from France, Germany, Great Britain
and Ireland ; and as the older populations passed away, the intervening middle
aged and youth carried forward the local government in an uninterrupted
succession, a continuous and unbroken intellectual current. From the very
beginning of man in masses, the higher history of his great spiritual power
has not been given; and it is only in the faith of heredity, reproduction, or
occasional eminency of achievement, that we know the inspiration of our
predecessors. In occasional family records only may we find the honest and
noble township spirit ; but, to a moral certainty, their fine patriotic thought
has descended to the generation or two that honor the townships of Wayne
county. Illustration of this pleasant reminiscence is largely exhibited in the
county seat, of the important concerns of life, as religion, politics, law, trade,
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governmental policy; it is the debating center, it is the Atlas that bears the
public world of thought on its shoulders. Should any county be celebrated
for carrying forward the thought of its founders, Wayne county is that
favored realm. The Larwills, the Joneses, the Quinbys, the Millers, the
Wilhelms, the Currys, the Jeffries, the McMonigals, Flattery, Kaukes, Douglas,
Anderson Adair, Blackburn, Zimmerman, McSweeney, the Funcks, Barretts,
Marchand, Foreman. McClure, Smyser, the Howards, the Frances, Moses
Shaffer, Day, the Powers, and a hundred others, all familiar names in politics,
religious sects, government policy, for their respective views, stood like a
solid rock of hereditary tenacity. Avoiding the criticism that the idea is
commonplace, it may be observed that these American conditions, in the pres-
ent height of several thousand years of progress, have no parallel in national
life; of other, and all other nationalities, it is a king, and nobility; a house
of lords; a military dictatorship; a suppressed popular movement; some
modification of the hypocrisy of Augustus; or the bloody monarchism of
Tiberius, Caligula or Nero. The dome of no great capitol but ours is painted
with emblems of popular jealousy of an oligarchy or aristocracy of power.
The thinking people of the new Northwest are the bulwark of the republic;
they wear the mantle of their fathers.
FORTY YEARS OF GOVERNMENT.
Of the intelligence and fine nerve of the first citizens of Wayne county,
the systems of bookkeeping, the handwriting and the legal requisites of pub-
lic business bear witness. Within the first forty years after the incorporation
of Wayne county the character of its institutions was determined, and some
of the prominent actors of the people’s selection show a capacity for the
highest positions.
Benjamin Jones and Cyrus Spink were representatives in Congress:
Edward Avery became a judge of the supreme court of Ohio; Reazin Beall,
a major-general; John Sloan, treasurer of the United States; Levi Cox and
Ezra Dean, president judges. There were nineteen associate judges, and
twenty-three members of the state Legislature. Beall avenue, Bever street.
Henry street, are memorials of the early settlers of that name; and Larwill
street and the records of Wayne county will, it is hoped, preserve the name
of Joseph H. Larwill, one of the most eminent of the pioneers of 1807.
In 1840 there were forty-six Revolutionary soldiers in Wayne county.
The eloquence of their wounds, the dignity of their position, were constantly
admonishing the people of the sacred trust of maintaining civil and political
liberty.
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Of the county, city, tdwn and township officers, the public records con-
tain the history; of all these municipal corporations, the officers and leading
men were intimately associated in official life.
That the city of Wooster was, at an early period, the centre of popula-
tion; that the municipal and township organizers were the source of mutual
information; that the early officers selected the foremost in interest for a
practical system of home rule, and that these foremost men rose to higher
representative positions by popular choice, may be assumed. The fact, in
civil and political history, became a magnificent force, that transmuted all
other forces into the popular system.
That Wayne county has always had an exceptionally good system of
county administration may be readilly observed in the records preserved since
1815. The entire judicial record of the county is marked by the able per-
formance of duty. The records at the very earliest period are evidence of
consummate skill and complete formality, and are precedents for almost one
hundred years; and one is impressed, surprised, at the remarkable accuracy
with which the public business was conducted ; and as the judicial administra-
tion involves the capacity and integrity of judges, prosecuting attorneys,
lawyers, clerks and sheriffs, this reference to them all is intended as an
encomium. No judge of Wayne county has ever been impeached; no lawyer
disbarred; no prosecuting attorney, no clerk or sheriff ever charged with
delinquency in office. The right of trial by jury has never been infringed,
and no juryman has ever been charged with any irregularity in the per-
formance of his duty. There is not a single known instance of a grand jury
being other+wise than conscientious in either returning or failing to return
an indictment. The same high character belongs to the probate court, since
it was created by the constitution of 1851, or while the probate business was
within the jurisdiction of the court of common pleas under the constitution
of 1802. The judges of this court for more than fifty years have been beyond
reproach.
The judgments of these courts have been reviewable by the higher
courts ever since the formation of the county, and the whole system has been
and is a protection to every right, and a relief against every wrong, to prop-
erty or person. But few instances have occurred of violation of law being
unpunished, and crimes of any magnitude are very rare in the history of the
county. Of divorces, of which the judge of the court of common pleas has
the sole jurisdiction, but few have been granted not necessary to the pro-
tection of the wife, or the honor of the husband. The financial system of
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the county, conducted by a board of commissioners, the auditor and treas-
urer. the occasional duties of the prosecuting attorney and probate judge,
and involving the safe custody and legal expenditure of the money con-
tributed by the people for the support of the county and state government,
is about as perfect as human ingenuity could devise. Of personal property
enlisted by the assessors, and of real property as appraised, returned to the
auditor, duplicates are given to the treasurer, exhibiting the amount to be
collected as ascertained by the rate of taxation necessary for public purposes,
and upon which the treasurer enters his collections and returns the same to
the auditor. Not only the auditor’s books, but the examination of the treas-
ury by the commissioners and a private committee appointed by the probate
judge, are precautions for the safety of the public money. The loaning of
the money of the county to the banks at interest, and upon security, is an
additional guaranty, to the treasurer’s bond, of its safety. Nor are there
fewer safeguards around the expenditure of the public money. It cannot be
paid out but upon the order of the auditor, nor can he issue an order except
according to express provision of law, unless the claim is allowed by the
board of commissioners. The claim filed with them must remain five days
before allowance, and no order can issue by the auditor until five days after
the allowance. The prosecuting attorney may interpose in the expenditure,
and the report of the business of the commissioners required to be filed by
them in the court of common pleas is examined by a committee, and the ex-
penditures reviewed by the court. The further review of the action of these
officers is provided for by state inspection. The further view that all the
financial officers of the county give bond, that they are governed by strict
law, and are responsible to the people at the election, present the system, as
exceedingly satisfactory to the contributors to the public expense.
As the growth of the thought and experience of one hundred years, the
system is a eulogy upon the framers of the government.
As early as 1792 the offices of treasurer-general and county treasurers
were created, and the mode of raising money to defray county expenses by
the Council of the Territory, and in 1799 the Territorial Legislature created
the offices of territorial treasurer and auditor of public accounts and for
levying a territorial tax on lands, and to regulate county levies. In 1802 the
constitution provided for the appointment by the Legislature of state treas-
urer and auditor and other officers were to be appointed as directed by law.
Gradually the county system embraced a treasurer and auditor as appointive,
then elective, and afterwards developed in the constitution of 1851. But
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prior to 1802 the county treasurer was a collector who reported to the state
treasurer and auditor, and progressive legislation has added to the defective
systems of the past the fine checks and supervision of the present.
A successful administration of the finances of Wayne county is apparent
from the records. Complications some thirty or forty years ago, in connection
with the temporary use of county money by the banks, and from the good
nature and accommodating spirit of the elective system, arose and produced
a disturbance in the treasurer's office; but, in view of the large amount of
money safely received and disbursed in the history of the county, a further
notice of the trouble is not deemed of importance. The writer does not regard
it inappropriate to say that the virtues of generosity were more predominant
in the single case or two of financial embarrassment in the treasurer's office,
than any inherent vice in the officer.
Surveys underlying conveyances, the office of county surveyor and
recorder may be considered in this relation. Records, maps, plats in these
offices would tend to give them the name of the Wayne County Museum;
more than relics, different from mere calculations or journal entries, associated
with what seem the hieroglyphics of the surveyor, and the time-worn and
time-stained canvas upon which human and departed genius has impressed
the studious manifestation of scientific thought, they seem the interesting
memorials of a superior race.
To transfer the record evidence of the government land offices, to per-
petuate the legal right of every section of land in Wayne county, of every
plat of every town, their lots and streets and alleys, additions, vacations and
dedications, their boundaries and the ranges and sections and divisions of
sections, their purchase, sale, transfer deeds, mortgages, leases and releases,
commencing a hundred years ago, these records attest the truth of history,
without which truth the ownership of property would be a chaos. Not only
the magnitude of work, but the accuracy of it, attest the good fortune of the
people that, as early as 1813, had William Larwill as the first and Levi Cox
as the second recorder, and that, as early as 1814, had Joseph H. Larwill as
the first, and Cyrus Spink as the second surveyor of Wayne county, and
that they laid the foundations for the system of records that led on to the
immense volumes of these offices and to the scientific methods of surveying.
That there were so many distinguished men early and later that formed and
continued the methods of county administration, is a remarkable fact in the
history of Wayne county; perhaps not as remarkable in any other county
in the Northwest.
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Of the participation of the residents of the towns and townships in county
administration, a cursory observation of the records produces the impression
that after the active energies of the first generation were employed, for
twenty-five years, in county administration, it was conducted largely by offi-
cers of the townships, and almost wholly so in the .respect of county commis-
sioners. Of the associate judges, senators and representatives in the General
Assembly, treasurers, auditors, recorders and surveyors, a majority came
from the townships; at this present writing, every officer of the county ad-
ministration, except the prosecuting attorney, is either from the townships
directly or recently after removal to the county seat. The significance of
this fact leads to a very brief consideration of the conditions out of which
it arises. The townships being organized in 1825 were rapidly settled, of
the same character of population as the county seat; many of them were
educated men and, township government demanding justices of the peace,
trustees and other officers both in the townships and towns, they became
familiar with modes not only of self-government, but county administration,
and many of them were conspicuous for their intelligence and ability. Doubt-
less acquainted with the laws and official procedure of the older states, they
were competent to make and administer laws that were necessary to the
growth of a great state. The great principle of unity was the well authenti-
cated fact of the integrity and patriotism of the people and their conscious
responsibility of a sacred duty.
In addition to some local legislation for the construction of public build-
ings, and to enable the city of Wooster to obtain the Baltimore & Ohio rail-
way, an important elective principle was established by the supreme court
in the case of Lehman vs. McBride, by which the former was elected probate
judge, in holding that soldiers of the Civil war in service in or out of the
state were entitled to vote and have the same returned to the county of their
residence.
In forty years, a period that embraced the constitution of 1851, and a
much shorter period than that in which any government of which history
speaks was perfected, the people of Wayne county, and it is true of the
whole state, in one single classification, were the distinguished authors of
their county administration.
WAYNE COUNTY AS THE SOURCE OF NORTHWESTERN GOVERNMENT.
Wavne county having been organized as a separate political body in
1812, an election was held to elect county officers in April of that year, as
provided in the constitution of 1802. The county, within the state lines, was
(n)
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laid out in the year 1808, but incorporated with diminished territory in
1812. By changes in forming new counties, it seems to have been re-incor-
porated in 1817, and not defined in its present form until 1846, a portion
of its territory having been taken in 1824 to form Holmes county, and a por-
tion to form Ashland county in 1846. Of the Northwest, the rapidly increas-
ing population, the formation of new counties, and the immigration from
Wayne county to the yet farther west, decreased its population from thirty-
six thousand in 1840 to thirty-two thousand in 1850, and carrying with it
the advanced methods of civil and political life, of their first homes in the
new country. Of government as a necessity, such methods travel with rapid-
ity and reflect their origin in institutions and practical life, at advanced dis-
tances of civilization. Of this transmission of population and experience in
promoting order and obedience to law, Wayne county has been the continuous
source from a very early day to the present time.
INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL LIFE.
The individual and social life of the pioneers has been scarcely men-
tioned, and demands a consideration in this article.
The elevation of man by the consciousness of freedom, and by the doc-
trine of equal rights, is manifested in the high development of the sensibilities.
Liberty is the progenitor of love. The Constitution of the United States
created family emotion. It created the neighbor, the neighborhood, the peace
and pleasure of proximity; it is the father of family history and reunions.
Wayne county is celebrated for the yearly reunions of widely scattered de-
scendants. The reproductions and reminiscences of home are incentives to
good government. That holy veneration for ancestors is distinguished in
Wayne county. In memory of the immigrants of the Northwest, — the fathers
and mothers, — yearly pioneer celebrations are regularly held by the aged
living and participated in by every age. In August, 1896, by civic proces-
sions, addresses, pyrotechnic displays, the people of Wayne county gave a
week of conspicuous sensibility to the memory of the pioneers.
The great character of these early architects of government is the logical
theme of progress and is among the first solicitudes of studious thought.
Reciuested tn deliver the centennial address at the great centennial cele-
bration then held in Wooster, the writer gave this subject a study that he
does not disturb; and feels that to give this address a permanent place in the
new history of Wayne county would be pleasing to the people and pertinent
to the subject, and it is here inserted and dedicated to our great ancestors:
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GREAT PRINCIPLES OF THE PIONEER FATHERS AND MOTHERS.
[Address delivered by Hon. Lyman R. Critchfleld at the Pioneer Day Centennial cele-
bration of Wayne county, August 15, 1896.]
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen :
As a matter of philosophical curiosity I have often thought that moral
reflection assumed the aspect of capillary attraction — the ascension of succes-
sive moral ideas; that our daily business thought was characterized by ex-
pansion and our immoral processes of mind by gravitation, our highest trains
of thought are religious and are the most ennobling and refining. The sensi-
bilities constitute the highest class of human faculty, and hence in the ethics
of religion, which display the grace of good manners, politeness, taste, beau-
tiful expression, luminosity, a higher conception of personal art, of skill and
harmony, and reverence for the good, we climb to the height of an exalted
century. This is civilization ! The rhetoric of the flags, the great orations
of the human face, the ihutual enthusiasm of reverence for the pioneers, are
playing upon our hearts like the sunbeams on the singing statue of Memnon.
Civilization is only about a hundred years old ! Liberty is only about a
hundred years old ! The republicanism of the heart is only about a hundred
years old! History contains no such beautiful picture as the pioneer and
his wife, as they stand in the umbrageous setting, with their faces all glow-
ing with the splendor of the century ahead !
Amidst the thronging reminiscences of a hundred years, We meet in com-
memoration of the legal incorporation of our great county, and with grateful
hearts we honor the pioneers. Our century is perfected on a day of beauty,
in a time of gorgeous apparel, in an illumination of many fixed stars of
progress. Centuries come and centuries go, and man goes on forever, but
the world has never witnessed such noble sensibilities intoning the harmony
of any civilization. August 15, 1796; August 15, 1896! We gaze upon a
century of virtue and love and liberty. And it commenced a hundred years
ago! Noble footsteps, sweet voices, are echoing along the corridors of time.
Flowers of every hue and every fragrance are blossoming in the dust. Rosv-
fingered Aurora, as she stands tiptoe upon the misty mountain-top, gives her
first morning kiss to the green hillocks, and the clustering flowers, beneath
which repose the divine imagery of the pioneers; and the sun, in all his course,
illumines no more sacred mould than that which was wont to ennoble life
within the little circle of our woodland heroes. The heroic man! Aye. and
the heroic Woman, the early American woman of more than historic virtue, of
more than historic courage.
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With what inspiration may I conceive, or with what rhetoric or elo-
quence may I paint the physical and moral picture of the pioneers ; how in the
fullness of the providence of God they glowed with the revelation of the lib-
erty and power of the people in government, of faith in a personal God, and
in immortality, and how they divinely fixed the purity of domestic life and
social order, and the dignity of woman, and endured and loved through the
great martyrdom of founding the greatest institutions of the world. They
were the philosophers of free institutions. They were the greatest of their
race. Plume ourselves, as self-love may dictate, upon our higher nerve and
less muscle, less conflict and more judicial reflection, we are less brave and
less pure than those whose voluntary dedication took the vanguard on the
forest lines of progress. And it was an age of greatest peoples throughout
the world, and of greatest institutions of any previous, or of all the centuries.
Excelling as did the pioneers of a hundred years ago, our philosophy traverses
the prior ages for the great formative causes of the illustrious Americans,
who are our fathers and mothers. To acknowledge the eternal sovereignty
of hereditary influences is an imperative premise, in the logic of American
character. And we may recur to the broken annals of centuries. We may
scan the absoq)tion of Greek civilization by the Romans, the downfall of
the Roman empire, and the mixed populations of Roman, Goth and Vandal,
and Anglo-Saxon, and Hun, and Celt, and Dane, with all their diversity of
customs, laws and religion, and the storms of violence, and dissolution of
states, and warring cities, and independent principalities, without union or
magistracy, all bleeding on foreheads debased by an iron crown, dismembering
into a thousand fragments, and forming and reforming for a thousand years
and more, over all the European states, and see the temper of populations
toward the order, constitutional government and liberty which inspired the
American pioneer With the great principles of government.
Students of history, as all Americans were, they seem to have had the
birthright perception of the grandeur of the great hereditary thought and
impulse which a century ago presided over the political, moral and social life
of the great pioneers. For twelve centuries the struggle went on of arrogant
baron, and city, without an umpire; then an elective one, then an elective
monarchy, then an hereditary one: then the struggle for constitutional limi-
tations of regal authority and all authority. As long practice and skill in
sculpture worked out the divine beauty of the Greek woman, or reflection
and example in a thousand tests of color and proportion fixed Pilate to future
ages uttering his “ecce homo” as lie delivered Jesus to be crucified, so we
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may trace the patriot with his great and beautiful face and exalted bearing
in the beginning of this Western empire, fashioned by centuries of struggle.
And he was born amidst that tumult of popular revolution which then and
thereafter ensanguined the battlements of every modern state.
An age of storms lowered upon the pioneers. Product of the evolution of
political and moral causes, our fathers were felling oaks \vhile the invention
of Doc. Guillotine was felling the one hundred and twenty-five thousand
heads of aristocracy, and monarchy, which had grown in France from law-
less banditism, when there was no people but aristocracy, and feudal serfs,
and enslaved citizens of municipal tyranny, and no judicial idea in govern-
ment, and no executive power but the sword. The fathers of the pioneers
were contending with savagery in a Western hemisphere while the feudal
barons were slaughtering their poor peasantry in the Thirty Years war in
the German provinces. Holland was struggling for liberty under the Prince
of Orange, Switzerland by isolation, as much as by principle, was playing her
political romance in her mountains fired by the story of Tell, the Austrian
Gessler, and the immortal Winkelried, and the little republic of San Marino
sat, like an American child, amidst the flaming and bleeding contentions of
the Italian cities. Beyond the analysis of all philosophy a composite English
ancestry of Dane and Anglo-Saxon and Norman had risen to the awful
dignity of beheading the usurping Charles I, and English democrats like
Vane and Sidney and Pym and Hampden had perished on the scaffold, or
in the tower, in the advocacy of constitutional restriction of royal oppression,
and of the power of the representative assembly, the great House of Com-
mons, to govern the English people. Fleeing from the revengeful axe of
Charles II, the regicides and the ironsides of Cromwell, and from the religious
inquisitions of the state, the revolutionists, the vanguard of the reign of the
popular will, began to appear in Virginia, in North Carolina and in Mas-
sachusetts; the Quakers and German in Pennsylvania; the French began to
appear in Louisiana, and all European populations of America were educated
in the struggle of the Middle ages for the unity of government under the
limitations of law. Under magistracy and judicial authority of government
rose the pioneers. The great constitution of the United States is but the
manifestation of the judicial elective principle which struggled for its ex-
istence from the decline and fall of the Roman empire to the day of its
adoption. The pioneers of settlement were also thoughtful pioneers of great
principles of government.
But the science of pioneering demanded the supremacy of another great
principle of life — religious faith. Vain would be the attempt to trace the
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history of that philosophy which attempted to spiritualize matter, to give it
self-creative power, and to analyze the human mind into the faculties of in-
comprehension. Disclosing the most abstruse and the most absurd schools
of philosophers involved in the meshes of the agnostic fallacies of the great
unknowable — from five hundred years before Christ — from Pythagoras and
his disciples to Socrates, on to Plato and Aristotle, and Zeno, and Epicurus,
and their disciples, Greeks, and Seneca, Lucretius and Cicero, Romans, to
the Middle ages, when scholasticism attempted to adjust the Christian theory
to the doctrines of Plato, reason became imbecile in the poison of infidelity,
and, like government, religion was wielding its sceptre over a world of con-
fusion. And then modern philosophy arose, and the German reformation, and
the emancipation of thought, brought upon the stage Melancthon, and Eras-
mus, and Luther, and Locke and Lord Bacon, and on the other hand Des-
cartes, Spinosa, Voltaire, Leibnitz, Kant, Schilling, Hegel, and later followed
by Comte and Spencer, and hundreds of others, the former supporting, the
latter, in platonic renaissance, attacking the great idea of a personal God.
And notwithstanding the cruelties of the church, its inquisitions, its destruc-
tion of whole communities, the corruptions of its temporal power, and the deg-
radation of its theology, w'hich transformed our Heavenly Father into a
savage, who took delight in the torture and death of the inquisition, and not-
withstanding the almost universal influence in France and Germany of the
infidel philosophers, Holland and Switzerland and England stood impreg-
nable upon that promontory of progressive thought wiiere God had erected
the lighthouse of religious truth. In all the bloody contentions of Catholic,
and Episcopalian, of state religion, Presbyterianism, and Puritanism, of Luth-
eran and Jesuit, and notwithstanding the French infidelity which accom-
panied French supplies and arms in the revolution, there flourished the great
Christian merchants of Manhattan, the poor, but inflexible Puritan of Ply-
mouth, the refugee of the Albigenses and Huguenots of the Carolinas, and the
Republican Catholic of Maryland. God led the great republican hosts from
wilderness to wilderness by the pillar of fire and pillar of cloud. The pioneer
was a Christian and the prayerful worshipper of a personal Father.
The pioneers believed in domestic equality, one of the great principles
of civilization, which emerged from the dark and bloody sea of the Middle
ages. Disappearing in the convulsions of empire, the beautiful face and form
of the Greek female, the dignified and lofty bearing of the Roman matron, is
seen no more for fifteen enslaving centuries. As they were even in the hal-
cyon days of their renown in the thoroughfares of Athens and Rome, they
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were the sport of the law-maker; and in the common perception of the so-
called philosophers of the prytaneum of the one city, and of the Roman sen-
ate, so inferior that they bore the personal blows of their husbands and the
shadow of the harem ; and legal brutality and death clouded the bright fancies
of their exalted sex.
As prisoners of war enslaved, trampled to death by a brutal soldiery,
the females of the dark ages gave birth to inferior men and women, and
through all the tumult of cities stormed, and estates dismantled, the hideous
process of depreciating populations made progress toward the mental and
moral decreptitude of the race, and prolonged the darkness of the centuries.
In his history of civilization, Guizot announces that marriage was, in the
dark ages, less esteemed than continence or celibacy.
Aroused into moral enthusiasm by the Crusades, the creation of some
unity and protection in government and the free thought and Christian light
of the Reformation, the ancient mothers were rehabilitated in something
of the tenderness and adoration with which remote antiquity had clothed them,
and as the principles of free constitutions, and of the recognition of the true
personality of God and the equality of all souls before Him, became the law
of liberty and social life, they regained the queenly crown which had been
beaten from woman’s head in the ages of violence. And she, the ornament
of the new world, was also a pioneer, and around her the protecting arm
of her husband was placed in tenderness as the dangers of the woods uttered
their weird voices, and her noble bosom warmed his heart as it grew cold in
the hardships and struggles of the frontier.
The magnificent conditions of their freedom, their faith and their love
inspired the pioneers with the noble philosophy of republicanism.
Washington was then President of the United States; the eulogies of
history were ranking him with Caesar and Fabius. Napoleon as First Con-
sul was imitating his swift marches and sudden attacks, as he descended into
the plains of Italy; he had become estranged from the lordly Fairfaxes and
the aristocracy; his moderate education, his long marches in the woods as
surveyor; the fidelity of the common people, and the treason of the influential,
had hedged him all about with deathless patriotism, and he, with the Otises,
and Adams, the Morrises, the Putnams, the Carrols, the Jeffersons and Hamil-
tons constituted a new and immortal race of great commoners. They had
created the elective and popular system of the constitution ; they had by the
ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in all this Northwest territory; the
common schools of New England had inspired the philosophical analysis of
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human rights; Webster and Clay and Silas .Wright and Benton and Jackson,
and the great statesmen and generals of the West, grew into majesty as the
composite blood of the heroic commonalty swelled the heart and soul of a new
nation of commoners; commoners who fifty years thence were to tie them-
selves to the masts amidst bursting shells and cannon balls, or from some
promontory won by blood pour the storms of resistless war upon the last
surviving deformity of feudal arrogance and slavery. Such were the pio-
neers; heralds of a great nation, a great religion, and a great domestic life.
Power could not frighten them ; infidelity could not confuse them ; divorce did
not dishonor them. Believe not that anything of outward splendor marked
the simplicity of their great appointment. Moccasins for shoes, homemade
linen or woolen for clothes somewhat uncouth, the red wammus, the coon-
skin cap, the uncut hair and beard, and the stalwart frame is the statue of the
pioneer, as he stands in the background of the forest his shining rifle barrel
across his arms; and she is the statue in flannel clad, with a quilted hood in
winter, and a calico one for summer, and the blush of the clearing upon her
cheek. Longfellow's Priscilla :
She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest,
Making the humble house and the modest apparel of home spun,
Beautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!
And they grew upward as they gazed at the stars through the tree-tops, and
their steps were soft in the moss of primeval shade, and they were agile and
fleet among the deer, and the speculation of wary watching was in their eves
at hostile identations of the leaves of pro'wling animals and Indian cunning.
Near by some limpid spring singing in rippling monotone the subterranean
song of cooling hills, rose their cabin of rounded logs and puncheon floors,
with doors of wooden hinges, and windows glassed in oil, and tables, benches
and bedsteads made by hand from the growing tree, and in the broad fire-
place with its external chimney of sticks and mud, the housewife cooked with
heated cheeks and baked her cornbread in the ashes, and sat her table with
pewter plates ; bunches of sage and medicinal roots were about the walls,
and the rude ceilings were festooned with strings of drying pumpkins and
hanging corn, and the cabin was noiseless in the shoeless feet of children, and
upon a rude ladder they gracefully ascended garrets to their evening nests;
and the lullabys of the day were drowned in the hum of the spinning wheel
and in the feathery songs of the surrounding shades; and their light was the
tallow dip, and their clock was the sunbeam in the door; and the leaves pil-
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lowed and mattressed the muscles of daily struggle among the roots, and sleep
had its dreams of home. Here was the dignity of prose amidst the romance
and poetry of nature. Sallying forth, either of them master of the rifle, either
of them dispersed the prowling panther or the bear from the stable or the
pen:
Hidden in the alder bushes
There he waited till the deer came,
Till he saw two antlers lifted,
Saw two eyes look from the thicket,
Saw two nostrils point to windward,
And a deer came down the pathway,
Flecked with leafy light and shadow.
Scarce a twig moved with his motion
Scarce a leaf was stirred or ruffled.
And the fearless and noble mother met the Indian at the doorway and cowed
him with that sternness of penetration with which the divinity of a noble
glance conquers all savage life. The pioneers were incomparably brave. And
around them were prowling the nomadic butchers of the French and British
wars, who veiled their clear purpose of assassination in the humble hypocrisy
of a broken tongue, and a simulated friendship, and who never for a moment
ungrasped the murderous weapon which their orators had chosen for savage
arbitration.
A resident of Europe in pre-historic times, and crossing to America
upon the isthmus of the fabulous Atlantis, or in the opposite of Behring
Straits, a great race and government existed in America before the acorns
grew to mighty oaks. Vicissitudes unwritten dispersed a dismembered rem-
nant before the mighty presence of moral forces. Of native brain and ner-
vous powers excelled by few of the human family, the noble virtues were ob-
solete in the vacuity of moral will, and the cunning, artifice, and cruelty, with
the inventive ingenuity of the Indian, were in the menacing shadows which
enveloped the pioneer; and he became learned in the simulated signals of the
bear and the mocking bird and the owl, and heard their warwhoop in the
adjacent wigwams, and looked with sacrificial bravery upon the terrors with
which a confederacy had menaced the gathering civilization far-reaching
from the woodland realms of King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh and Osceola.
Upon the morning horizon of the pioneers rose the savage files, and he heard
the savage murmur of their favorite retreats.
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Down the rivers, o’er the prairies,
Came the warriors of the nations,
Came the Delawares and Mohawks,
Came the Choctaws and Comanches,
Came the Shoshones and Blackfeet,
Came the Pawnees and the Omahaws,
Came the Mandans and Dacotahs,
Came the Hurons and Ojibways,
With their weapons and their war gear
Painted like the leaves of autumn,
Painted like the sky of morning;
In their faces stern defiance,
In their hearts the feuds of ages,
The ancestral thirst of venegance.
But danger lurked in the suppressed fury and in the warning glance of
the pioneer, and his moral power, rather than his prowess, working in the
providence for which he prayed, had the leverage and the pressure of a great
victory over savage life; and the growl, and the chatter, and the rustle, and
the crackling, and the ominous impressions, the savage undertones of nature,
the song of the cricket, the hoarse bass of the frog, the dreadful chimes of
the rattlesnake, the rhythmic pulsations of the night, the weird beating vitality
of the voiceless woods, mingled With the echoes of the warwhoop, and the
drunken chant of these barbarians, and grew by the moral chemistry of
virtue into the sweet tenor of patience and endurance in the great soul of the
pioneer. Before the gigantic savage chief, painted hideously for war, and
with a tiger’s eye, and armed with gleaming instruments of revenge and
of death, the pioneer was the royal disarming angel of a new covenant of the
family, religious faith and liberty.
In social relations the pioneer was great hearted. Benevolence and hos-
pitality reigned in the cabins of the pioneer. Magnetic forces massed the
incomparable few into raisings, and log rollings, and huskings, and the red
ear of corn made fiery faces and rumpled frills. Little Killbuck bore upon
his tortuous bosom the floating raft laden with skins of the coon, the opos-
sum, the deer, the bear, and the wild cat, and a few Spanish or American
silver dollars to exchange at Zanesville for salt and flour, tobacco and Whisky,
and the missionary with saddle bags on horseback, of Baptist, Presbyterian,
Lutheran or Methodist, was welcomed at the cabin doors, smoked the pipe
of peace, strengthened his inspiration with the bottle of tansy bitters, and
related the news of long Eastern months, and how the government at Phila-
delphia, at New York or Washington still lived, how the great commoners
were still defying the world, and how John Marshall was electrifying the
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magistracy of the older continent, by his great luminous conscience and
philosophical intellect; and these early judges of the township exteriorly rough
and interiorly refined, sat upon stumps and, as jurors, upon logs, and ad-
ministered justice intuitionally according to the inspiration of the Woods and
the common law of necessity.
The politician was a rara a* is among the pioneers:
Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the State;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great;
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold;
The romans all were brothers
In the brave days of old.
For almost a half a century from the formation of the constitution,
political parties were mere nomenclature, and but little less than depositaries
of exploded suggestions of constitutional debate. Political independence
now is retrograding to the more noble reflection and conservatism of the
pioneer.
Supposed to have been gradually ascending the zenith of civilization, if
the present age adorns its ascension with the universality of great physical
condition, of education, of science, of art, of commerce, of architecture, of
magnificent houses and great cities, and great churches and great popula-
tion, then its ascension is incomparably true. But great principles have not
been added to constitutional government, not one beam from the effulgent
throne of God, not one throb to the love of domestic life, not one impulse to
the noble souls of the pioneer! Patriotic, religious, pure, patient, suffering
all things, and true and unchanging to the virtue of all future ages, my con-
science, your conscience, at this hour, are full of the glory of a great ancestry,
and we bow before them, with only less reverence than that we feel for the
Divine Father.
Attended by thousands of people of Wayne and adjoining counties, this
celebration involved a high condition of the sensibilities. As the anniversary
of the first organization of the county, a hundred years presented a panorama
in which, from the log cabin to the palace, from a few to thousands, from
poverty to wealth, from humble patriotism to greatness, the reminiscences
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invoked the dearest memories. The then present was Worthy of the past.
Heroism had not died. There were present the heroes of the great wars.
The patriotic spirit of the people of Wayne county has been demonstrated
in every war of the republic. Many of the early settlers had served under
Washington ; they joined Gen. Reasin Beall in the war of 1812, and marched to
the support of the frontier inhabitants of Wayne and Richland counties, and
ultimately to Camp Huron; they enlisted and fought in the battles of the
Mexican war of 1845; they volunteered by thousands and fought, and many
of them perished, in the war for the preservation of the Union in 1861, and
the same hereditary patriotism inspired a noble array of young men to enlist
in the war with Spain in 1898. Splendid in courage, the fathers and mothers
of early Wayne county transmitted their virtues to their posterity.
WAYNE AND ASSOCIATE COUNTIES PROLIFIC OF GREAT MEN.
That the counties of Ohio were and are, respectively, of early super-
iority, leads to a broader suggestion and inspiration that solves the riddle of.
Ohio's great leadership and presidential glory among the states. The people
were a distinguished composite race. The Celt, the Briton, the Dane, the
Saxon, the Norman, the German, the Welsh, invulnerable to the attack of the
Roman empire, the Virginian, the followers of Penn, Maryland's colonial
great men, the Puritan, and the Dutch of Manhattan, the Scotch, and the
courtiers of the Carolinas; this composite American conceived and bred a
race too great for Britain, and transplanted the heroism and love of liberty,
and the wisdom that attended Washington in his conquest of British soil
and her great armies. From the races of the world there arises the new
man, and the new woman, exalted to the intellectual dominion of govern-
ment, and the progenitors of forty states. Of the third county of the North-
west, this unrivalled race, whose men were fearless and wise, and whose
women were good and beautiful, made their home here a hundred years ago.
Government was the absorbing question and principles of government the
absorbing philosophy.
Into the very nerves of men, into the very spirit and motive of action,
into the very and only scheme of growth, individualism, personal liberty,
patriotism, l>ecame incorporated elements. Liberty echoed in the crash of
the falling oaks. She was delightful in the sunshine of the fields; she was
aromatic in the odor of the flowers. She garlanded the determined faces of
men and women with the bloom of orchards, and golden grain. She made
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them beautiful, strong and heroic, and great generations of eloquent, thought-
ful people filled Ohio. The eastern division of the Northwest, and the wide
territory of Wayne, the greatest of the subdivisions of the state, was un-
equalled in the character of its founders in all the counties of the new states
of the Union. This splendid inception and continuance for over a century
of the government of the people, we may safely leave to the present and
posterity, and repeat the invocation of Longfellow :
Thou, too, sail on, O ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel.
What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel.
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rung, what hammers beat,
In what a forge, and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
’Tis of the waves, and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest’s roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
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CHAPTER IX.
COUNTY, STATE AND NATIONAL REPRESENTATION.
The subjoined is a correct list of the various officers who have served
from Wayne county, in various official capacities, since the county’s or-
ganization in 1812. The members of Congress who have represented dis-
tricts of which Wayne county formed a part were :
Reasin Beall 1813-1815
David Clendennin 1815-1817
Peter Hitchcock 1817-1819
John Sloan 1819-1821
John Sloan 1821-1823
John Sloan. . . . .* 1823-1825
John Sloan 1825-1827
John Sloan 1827-1829
John Thomason 1829-1831
John Thomason 1831-1833
Benjamin Jones 1833-1835
Benjamin Jones 1835-1837
Mathias Shepler 1837-1839
David A. Starkweather. . . 1839-1841
Ezra Dean 1841-1843
Ezra Dean 1843-1845
David A. Starkweather. . 1845-1847
Samuel Lahm 1847-1849
David K. Carter 1849-1851
David K. Carter 1851-1853
Harvey H. Johnson 1853-1855
Philemon Bliss 1855-1857
Philemon Bliss 1857-1859
Harrison G. Blake 1859-1861
Harrison G. Blake 1861-1863
George Bliss 1863-1865
Martin Welker 1865-1867
Martin Welker 1867-1869
Martin Welker 1869-1871
James Monroe 1871-1873
James Monroe 1873-1875
James Monroe 1875-1877
William McKinley, Jr. . . . 1877-1879
James Monroe 1879-1881
Addison S. McClure 1881-1883
Joseph D. Taylor 1883-1885
Isaac H. Taylor 1885-1887
William McKinley, Jr. . . . 1887-1889
M. L. Smyser 1889-1891
A. J. Pearson 1891-1893
J. D. A. Richards 1893-1895
Addison S. McClure 1895-1897
John A. McDowell 1897-1899
John A. McDowell 1899-1901
J. W. Cassingham 1901-1903
J. W. Cassingham 1903-1905
M. L. Smyser 1905-1907
W. A. Ashbrook 1907-1909
MEMBERS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION.
The members of the Ohio constitutional convention of 1851-52 were
John Larwill, Leander Firestone. M. D., and E. Wilson: in 1873-74, the sec-
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ond constitutional convention, the member from Wayne county was John K.
McBride.
STATE SENATORS.
Columbia, Stark and Wayne District — Lewis Kinney and Joseph Rich-
ardson, 1812 to 1814; John Thompson. 1814 to 1816; John G. Young, 1815
to 1817.
Stark and Wayne District — John Myers, 1816 to 1818; Thomas G.
Jones, 1818 to 1820.
Wayne District — Thomas McMillan, 1820 to 1824; Edward Avery,
1824 to 1826.
Wayne and Holmes District — Joseph H. Larwill, 1826 to 1829, resign-
ing the last named year.
Wayne District — Benjamin Jones, 1829 to 1832; Thomas Robinson,
1832 to 1836; George Wellhouse, 1836 to 1838; Jacob Ihrig, 1838 to 1840;
John H. Harris, 1840 to 1842; Charles Wolcott, 1842 to 1844; Levi Cox,
1844 to 1846; John Willford, 1846 to 1847; Andrew H. Byers, 1847 to 1850.
Wayne and Ashland District — George W. Bull. 1850 to 1852.
Wayne and Holmes District — George Rex, 1852 to 1854; James Hock-
inberry, 1854 to 1856; Joseph Willford, 1856 to 1858; D. J. Perkey, 1858 to
i860; Benjamin Eason, i860 to 1862.
Wayne, Holmes , Knox and Morrow District — Davis Miles, 1862 to 1864;
Joseph C. Deven, 1864 to 1866; Frank H. Hurd, 1866 to 1868; Lyman R.
Critchfield, 1866 to 1867, resigning after the first session of 1866; Robert Jus-
tice, 1867 to 1868, filling out the unexpired term of Mr. Critchfield; George
Rex and C. H. Scribner, 1868 to 1870; Hinchmen S. Prophet, 1870 to 1872;
Henry McDowell, 1872 to 1874; Daniel Paul, 1874 to 1876; John Ault, 1876
to 1878; John W. Benson, 1878 to 1880; E. F. Poppleton, 1878 to 1880; J. J.
Sullivan, 1880 to 1882; Benjamin Eason, 1882 to 1884; Allen Levering, 1884
to 1886; J. J. Sullivan, 1886 to 1888; J. S. Bra'ddock, 1888 to 1890; John
Zimmerman, 1890 to 1892; Hugh A. Hart, 1891 to 1892, vice Zimmerman,
deceased; William G. Beebe. 1892 to 1894; N. Stilwell, 1894 to 1896; W. M.
Harper, 1896 to 1898; Lake F. Jones. 1898 to 1900; N. Stilwell, 1900 to
1902; N. Stillwell, 1902 to 1904; L. B. Houck. 1904 to 1906; M. Vanover,
1906 to 1908; John M. Thompson, 19C8 to 1910.
MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.
Stark and Wayne District — Samuel Coulter, 1813 to 1814; William
Henry, 1814 to 1815 ; John Harris, 1815 to 1816. From 1816 to 1848, Wayne
county formed a representative district.
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Wayne District — Thomas McMillan, 1816 to 1820; Jacob Barker, 1820 to
1821; Benjamin Jones, 1821 to 1822; Cyrus Spink, 1822 to 1823: Robert
McClarran, 1823 to 1824; James Robinson. 1824 to 1825; Jacob Frederick,
1824 to 1826; David McConahay, 1826 to 1829; John Lohr, 1828 to 1829;
James Robinson, 1829 to 1831 ; Jacob Ihrig, 1830 to 1835; Jacob Ihrig, 1834
to 1836; Jacob Miller, 1835 to 1836; William Peppard, 1837 to 1839; Elzy
Wilson, 1839 to 1840; Thomas Shreve, 1839 to 1841 ; Charles Wolcott, 1841
to 1842; John Larwill and Joseph Willford, 1842 to 1843; Peter Wiloz, 1843
to 1844; John Brown, 1844 to 1845; Michael Totten and Joseph Willford,
1845 to 1846; George Emery, 1846 to 1847; Michael Totten, 1847 to J848.
Wayne and Ashland District — Abraham Franks, Jr., and Jacob Miller,
1848 to 1849; Abraham Franks, Jr., and George W. Bull, December, 1849,
to 1850; Charles R. Deming and Clinton Wilson, 1850 to 1852.
Wayne District — Clinton Wilson and Josiah H. Hitchcock, 1852 to 1854;
Ezra V. Dean and Joseph H. Downing, 1854 to 1856; John W. Buckingham
and Lorenzo D. Odell, 1856 to 1858; Lorenzo D. Odell, 1858 to i860; Wil-
liam C. Moore, i860 to 1862; John Ault, 1862 to 1864; John Brinkerhoff,
1864 to 1866; John Ault, 1866 to 1868; William R. Wilson, 1868 to 1872;
Thomas W. Peckinpaugh, 1870 to 1874; E. B. Eshelman, 1874 to 1876;
Thomas A. McCoy, 1876 to 1878; T. A. McCoy, 1878 to 1880; A. M. Arm-
strong, 1880 to 1882; W. P. VanDooran, 1882 to 1884; C. C. Stauffer,
1884 to 1886; J. W. Baughman, 1886 to 1888; J. W. Baughman, 1888 to
1890; M. J. Carroll, 1890 to 1892; M. J. Carroll, 1892 to 1894; C. H. Weiser.
1894 to 1896; A. Wiley, 1896 to 1898; A. Wiley, 1898 to 1900; U. F. Wells,
1900 to 1902; U. F. Wells. 1902 to 1904; Ed. S. W ertz, 1904 to 1906; Ed.
S. Wertz, 1906 to 1908; Price Russell, 1908 to 1910.
GENERAL REPRESENTATION FROM WAYNE COUNTY.
In the state and national government Wayne county has furnished the
following men :
Judge of the supreme court, Edward Avery and George Rex; Martin
Welker, lieutenant governor and judge of the United States court for the
northern district of Ohio; Hugh A. Hart, on the staff of Governor Campbell;
John MeSweenev. Jr., as trustee of several state institutions; Leander Fire-
stone. as superintendent of the Ohio Asylum for the Insane at Columbus and
of the Northern Ohio Asylum for the Insane at Xewberg; John Sloane, as
secretary of state for Ohio, and secretary of the treasure of the United States.
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under President William Henry Harrison; Gen. Reasin Beall, as major-gen-
eral of the United States army; Louis P. Ohliger, collector of internal rev-
enue; James Newkirk, statistician for the state; Benjamin Jones, a member
of the third state board of equalization; Jacob Ihrig, member of the fifth state
board of equalization; William Barton, member of the seventh board of
equalization.
THE CIRCUIT COURT.
A circuit court was created by an amendment to the constitution, to con-
sist of three judges. The circuit consists of the following fifteen counties :
Ashland, Coshocton, Delaware, Fairfield, Holmes, Knox, Licking, Morgan,
Morrow, Muskingum, Perry, Richland, Stark, Tuscarawas and Wayne.
The following members of the bar have acted as judges in this court:
Charles Follet, John W. Turner, John W. Albaugh, John I. Adams, Julius
C. Pomerene, Charles Kibler, George E. Baldwin, Richard M. Voorhis, Silas
M. Douglass, M. H. Donahue, Martin L. Smyzer, John W. Swartz, T. T. Mc-
Carty, Frank Taggart, John W. Craine and John Shields.
The present court is composed of Frank Taggart, M. H. Donahue and
Richard M. Vorhis.
JUDGES OF COMMON PLEAS COURT.
The dates below are when the judges were elected, as a rule:
Benjamin Ruggles 1812
William Wilson 1816
George Todd 1816
Alexander Harper 1822
Ezra Dean 1834
Jacob Parker 1841
Levi Cox 1848
Martin Welker 1852
William Sample 1857
William Given 1859
Joseph FI. Downing. 1866
William Reed 1867
('lurles C. Parsons 1877
(12)
Carolus F. Voorhis 1878
J. D. Nicholas 1887
W. Stillwell 1883
E. S. McDowell 1888
E. S. McDowell. 1893
John T. Maxwell 1897
Frank Taggart 1896
(Vice McDowell, deceased.)
C. Pomerene 1897
John T. Maxwell 1897
S. B. Eason 1898
Samuel FI. Nicholas 1907
W. E. Weygandt 1908
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
ASSOCIATE
JUDGES.
Christian Smith
1812
Jacob Frederick
1826
David Kimpton
1812
James Robinson . .
ro
00
John Cisna
1812
Hugh Culbertson
1833
David McConahav
1819
Stephen F.Day
1833
Thomas Townsend. . . .
18x9
George Wellhouse
1838
Thomas G. Jones
Samuel N. Bissell
1845
Tohn Nimmon
1819
Smith Orr
1847
John Patton
1821
Neal McCoy
1848
William Goodfellow. . .
Thomas Robinson
1848
Hezekiah Bissell
1826
James Swart
1849
By the constitution of 1852 associate judges were abolished.
CLERKS OF COMMON PLEAS COURT.
William Larwill was appointed clerk of this court by the supreme judges
of the state of Ohio, for seven years, the length of a term, serving from 1812
to 1826 in all in this office; Levi Cox served from 1826 to 1828; from
1828 to 1852, William Larwill, John Sloane and Samuel L. Lorah conducted
the office, though here the record is not quite clear as to the years served by
these gentlemen. From there on the record is: Benjamin Eason, 1852 to
1858; William Weiker, 1858 to 1861; C. C. Parsons, Sr., 1862 to 1868;
John W. Baughman, 1868 to 1874; George Power, 1874 to 1877; George
Power, 1877 to 1880; John Van Nostran, 1880 to 1886; Eli Zaring, 1886 to
1892; D. W. Musselman, 1892 to 1898; Samuel Esselburn, 1898 to 1904;
J. Harrold, 1904 to 1910.
COUNTY TREASURERS.
William Smith was appointed first county treasurer in 1812. The first
executed treasurers bond on record in the auditor’s office is that of Francis
H. Foltz, dated 1819. the office to be held by him until the first Monday of
the following June. In 1820 a similar bond was executed by Mr. Foltz.
In 1822 Samuel Quimby was appointed to the office, holding it until 1830,
when he was duly elected, filling the position for eight more years. James
Finley was elected in 1837, and held the office twelve years. The list from
the above dates to the present time is as follows:
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Neal Power 1849
David Carlin 1853
John Zimmerman 1857
M. W. Pinkerton 1861
Anthony W right 1 863
M. W. Pinkerton 1865
Jacob B. Koch 1867
John R. Helman 1871
Lewis P. Ohliger 1875
J. S. Caskey 1879
H. McClarran 1883
R. B. Wasson 1887
C. M. Lovett 1891
A. B. Blackburn 1895
D. Heller 1899
George J. Kreiger 1903
George J. Kreiger 1905
George J. Kreiger 1907
W. H. Zaugg 1909
COUNTY AUDITORS.
From 1810 to 1820 the county commissioners appointed their clerks,
who did the duties now discharged by the county auditors. In 1820 the office
of clerk of commissioners was abolished, and that of county auditor created.
Cyrus Spink 1 820- 1821
Cyrus Spink 1821-1 822
Samuel Knapp 1822-1823
Samuel Knapp 1823-1 824
Samuel Knapp 1 824- 1 826
Samuel Knapp 1 826- 1 828
John Smith 1828-1834
John H. Harris 1836-1840
Michael Totten 1840-1844
A. H. Byers 1844-1846
Lucian Upham. 1846-1848
J. P. Coulter 1 848- 1 852
C. C. Parsons, Sr 1852-1854
Thomas A. Adair 1854-1856
Frederick Fluke 1856-1858
Thomas A. Adair 1858-1860
F rederick Fluke 1 860- 1 864
T. W. Peckinpaugh 1864-1868
David Kling 1868-1870
W. W. Hamilton 1870-1872
George W. Henshaw 1872-1873
W. W. Hamilton died 1873
J. H. Carr served
T. J. McElhenie. 1874-1878
John B. Wilson. 1878-1880
John B. Wilson 18801882
John B. Wilson 1882-1884
T. E. Peckinpaugh 1884-1886
T. E. Peckinpaugh 1886-1888
T. E. Peckinpaugh 1888-1890
Henry Marshall 1890-1892
Henry Marshall 1892-1894
Henry Marshall 1894-1896
A. B. Peckinpaugh 1896-1898
A. B. Peckinpaugh 1898-1900
A. B. Peckinpaugh 1900-1902
I. N. Hough 1902-1904
I. N. Hough 1904-1906
I. N. Hough 1906-1909
James L. Zering 1909
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PROBATE
JUDGES.
Samuel L. Lorah
. . .1852-1855
Isaac Johnson
. . . .1881-1887
Henry Buckmaster ....
. . .1855-1858
Hiram B. Swartz. . . .
.... 1887-1890
Thomas Johnson
. . . 1858-1864
Hiram B. Swartz. . . .
1890-1893
Henry J. Lehman
. . . 1864-1867
John C. McClarran..
1893-1899
John K. McBride
. . .1867-1873
Robert L. Adair
....1899-1905
Joseph H. Downing. . .
. . . 1873-1876
T. W. Orr
1905-1908
Aquila Wiley
. . . 1876-1878
T. W. Orr
1908
John P. Jefferies
. . .1878-1881
SHERIFFS.
Josiah Crawford
. . . 1814-1814
William Coulter
1876-1878
Robert Orr
. . . 1814-1818
William Coulter
. . . . 1878-1880
John Updegraff
. . . 1818-1820
H. E. Messmore. . . .
.... 1880-1882
Joseph Barkdull
. . . 1820-1824
H. E. Messmore....
1882-1884
John Smith
. . . 1824-1828
Jacob Mougev
.... 1884-1886
Thomas Robison
. . . 1828-1832
Jacob Mougey
. . . . 1886-1888
Mathias Johnston
. . .1832-1836
E. A. Brown
1888-1890
Daniel Yarnell
. . . 1836-1838
E. A. Brown
1890-1892
M. C. Shant
. . . 1838-1842
John Brown
. . . . 1892
Samuel Kermickel ....
. . . 1842-1846
(Vice E. A. Brown,
deceased. )
Samuel Cutter
. . . 1846-1848
Cyrus D. Smith
. . . . 1892-1894
George W. Lorah
. . . 1848-1852
W. W. Garver
.... 1894-1896
John Bechtel
. . .1852-1856
W. W. Garver
. . . . 1896-1898
Neal McCoy
...1856-1858
J. S. McCov
. . . . 1898-1900
W. A. Eaken
. . . 1858-1860
J. S. McCoy
. . . . 1900-1902
Joshua Wilson
. . . 1860-1864
Armstrong Brown. . .
.... 1902-1904
John B. France
. . . 1864-1868
Armstrong Brown. . .
. . . . 1904-1906
George Steele
. . . 1868-1872
W. M. Caskey
. . . . 1906-1908
Jacob R. Bowman ....
. . . 1872-1876
W. M. Caskev
. . . . 1908
COU NTY C( ) M MISSION EKS.
1811 — James Morgan, John Carr and Jacob Foulkes.
1812 — Janies Morgan, Jacob Foulkes and John Carr.
1813 — Oliver Jones. Jonathan Butler and Benjamin Miller.
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1814 — Oliver Jones and Samuel Mitchell.
1815 — Oliver Jones, Samuel Mitchell and Robert McClarran.
1816 — Samuel Mitchell, George Bair and Aaron Baird.
1817 — George Bair, John Lawrence and Thomas Taylor.
1818— 19 — John ‘Lawrence, James Robison and Benjamin Jones.
1820 — John Lawrence, Matthew Johnson and James Robison.
1821 — Matthew Johnson, Charles Hoy and Joseph H. Larvvill.
1822 — Charles Hoy, Matthew Johnson and Basil H. Warfield.
1823 — B. H. Warfield, William McFall and Charles Hoy.
1824 — B. H. Warfield, William McFall and James Hindman.
1825 — William McFall, James Hindman and Stephen Coe.
1826 — James Hindman, Stephen Coe and Abram Ecker.
1827— 28 — Stephen Coe, Abram Ecker and George Wellhouse.
1829 — Jacob Ihrig, Stephen Coe and George Wellhouse.
1830 — Stephen Coe, George Wellhouse and John P. Coulter.
1831— 32 — John P. Coulter, Samuel Wilford and George Wellhouse.
1833 — Samuel Wilford, George Wellhouse and James McFadden.
1834 — George Wellhouse, James McFadden and Peter Emery.
*835-36 — James McFadden, Peter Emery and Andrew Ault.
1837- 38 — James McFadden, Andrew Ault and William Burgen.
1839 — Andrew Ault, William Burgen and James Cameron.
1840 — Andrew Ault, James Cameron and John Hess.
1841 — John Hess, James Y. Pinkerton and James Cameron.
1842 — James Y. Pinkerton, Henry Swart and Josh Kelley.
1843— 44 — James Y. Pinkerton, Henry Swart and John Walters.
1845 — James Y. Pinkerton, John Walters and Clinton Wilson.
1846 — James Y. Pinkerton, Clinton Wilson and Moses Foltz.
1847— 48 — Clinton Wilson, John Rice and Moses Foltz.
1849 — Clinton Wilson, John Rice and Henry Kramer.
1850- 51 — Henry Kramer, J. M. Blackburn and Conrad Franks.
1852-53 — J. M. Blackburn, Conrad Franks and John Hough.
1854 — J. M. Blackburn. J. B. Gregor and J. Hough.
1855 — J- B* Gregor, J. M. Blackburn and Alex Ramsey.
1856 — Benjamin Norton, J. B. Gregor and Alex Ramsey.
1857 — Alex Ramsey, William Barton and Benjamin Norton.
1858 — Benjamin Norton, William Barton and John Sickman.
1859— 60 — William Barton, John Sickman and Henry Shreve.
1861-62 — Henry Shreve, V. W. Ault and William Barton.
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182
1863-64 — Henry Shreve, V. W. Ault and Joseph Firestone.
1865 — V. W. Ault, S. M. Henry and Joseph Firestone.
1866 — V. W. Ault, S. M. Henry and A. Dawson.
1867 — S. M. Henry, A. Dawson and John McGill.
1868 — S. M. Henry, I. Schriber and A. Dawson.
1869— 70 — S. M. Henry, I. Schriber and A. Adair.
1871 — I. Schriber, A. Adair and John W. Newkirk.
1872 — I. Schriber, J. W. Newkirk and F. N. Haskins.
18 73 — John W. Newkirk, F. N. Haskins and Benjamin Weygandt.
1874 — Benjamin Weygandt, F. N. Haskins and Peter Stair.
1875— 76 — Benjamin Weygandt, Peter Stair and Henry Goudy.
By years the following were elected:
1878 — E. Quinby, Jr.
1879 — Peter Mougey.
1880 — E. Spangler
1882 — John McGlenen.
1883 — Isaiah Byall.
1884 — W. Spangler.
1885 — John McGlenen.
1886 — Isaiah Byall.
1887 — W. Spangler.
1887 — L. Graber.
1888 — Jacob Hess.
1889 — John McGlenen.
1890 — Anderson Oberlin.
1890 — Jacob Hess.
1892 — P. H. Blosser.
1893— M. M. Miller.
1894 — E. J. Pocock.
1895 — P. S. Blosser.
1896 — M. M. Miller.
1898 — J. W. Cutter.
1899 — Dan Leiner.
1900 — John Ramsey.
1901 — John F. Harrison.
1902 — W. Ramsey.
1904 — S. I. Lehman.
1905 — J. F. Harrison.
190 6— j. F. Villard.
1907 — D. Mcllvain.
1908 — J. F. Harrison.
1909 — G. W. Plasterer.
1909 — J. F. Villard.
COUNTY SURVEYORS.
Joseph H. Larwill 1814-1815
Cyrus Spink 1815-1817
Samuel Knapp 1817-1 81 S
James L. Spink 1818-1819
Cyrus Spink 1819-1820
James L. Spink 1820-1821
C. W. Christmas 1821-1832
George Emery 1832-1837
C. W. Christmas 1837-1838
John A. Lawrence 1838-1844
John Brinkerhoff 1844-1847
Lorenzo D. Odell 1847-1850
John Brinkerhoff 1850-1863
J. H. Lee 1863-1872
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
183
John Brinkerhoff 1872-1875
E. D. Shreve 1875-1883
John Brinkerhoff 1883-1886
Philip Markley 1886-1896
H. U. Mowery 1896-1901
Henry M. Knepp 1901-1908
Henry M. Knepp 1908
COUNTY RECORDERS.
William Larwill
. . 1813-1819
James F. Methven....,
. . 1873-1876
Levi Cox
. .1819-1833
Jacob Stark
. . 1876-1879
Joseph Clingan
• • 1833-1836
Jacob Stark
. . 1879-1882
J. Thompson
. . 1836-1842
Henry Marshall
. . 1882-1888
J. W. Crawford
. . 1842-1848
Joseph A. Schuch
. . 1888-1894
H. J. Conner
. . 1848-1854
Florian Schaffter
. . 1894-1900
H. J. Kauffman
. .1854-1858
L. G. Franks
. . 1900-1906
Emanuel Schuckers . . .
. . 1858-1864
A. S. Saurer
. . 1906-1909
Gideon B. Somers....
. . 1864-1867
A. S. Saurer
..1909-
Charles E. Graeter ....
. . 1867-1873
PROSECUTING
ATTORNEYS.
Roswell M. Mason . . . .
1812
Hamilton Richeson
1864
Nathaniel Mather
18x4
Thomas Y. McCray. . .
1868
J. W. Halleck
1815
Martin L. Smyser
1872
Alexander Harper
E. S. Dowell
1874
W. B. Raymond
1817
E. S. Dowell
1876
H. Curtis
1818
Cvrus A. Reider
1878
Lucas Flattery
1819
John McSweeney, Sr. .
1882
Levi Cox
1825
John McSweeney, Sr..
1885
William McMahon. . . .
1840
A. D. Metz
1888
Eugene Pardee
Ross W. Funck
1894
George W. Wasson . . .
1846
William E. Weygandt.
1897
George Rex
1848
Eugene Carlin
1903
John McSweeney, Sr. .
1852
Eugene Carlin
1906
John P. Jeffries
1856
L. R. Critchfield, Sr. . .
1908
George Rex
i860
INFIRMARY DIRECTORS.
The first infirmary directors of Wayne county were Casper T. Richey,
John Brinkerhoff and Thomas McKee. Jacob Hoffman was elected in 1852,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
serving four years. I. N. Jones was appointed to fill a vacancy occasioned
by the resignation of Jacob Hoffman and was elected in 1855, serving ten
years. John Hindman was elected in 1855 and served a term of six years.
Thomas Elliott was elected in 1857 and served six years. Aaron Franks
was elected in 1861, serving six years. Benjamin Norton served three years
and was succeeded by Andrew Moore in 1865, and he held the office for
six years. Jacob Kramer was elected in 1866 and served for six years.
Jacob Halfhill was elected in 1867, served two months, and died. Charles
Gasche was elected in 1872, serving six years. Joseph Holtzer was elected
in 1872 and served six years. Adam Eyman was elected in 1873. John
Alexander was elected in 1876. James McClarran was elected in 1877.
Other directors have been elected as follows: James McClarran, 1877;
Peter Buell, 1878; John H. Alexander, 1879; James Taggart, 1881; J. F.
Seas, 1883; Francis Little, 1887; Mr. Marshall, 1886; Mr. Langell, 1888;
A. M. Smedley, 1899; John Martin, 1893; Perry D. Cotterman, 1894;
John Martin, 1890; C. F. Plasterer, 1889; A. H. Smedley, 1896; Ira C.
Hindman, 1897; Ira C. Hindman, 1900; E. D. Amons, 1901; A. Straits,
1902; W. D. Rosier, 1904; Andrew Butler, 1906; J. A. Hamilton, 1908;
Bradley Ihrig and A. H. Smedley, also L. N. Patterson, 1908.
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CHAPTER X.
EDUCATIONAL.
When the pioneer band settled in the forest lands of Wayne county
they came to build for themselves homes, and to most of them that included
the proper training of their children, both in intellect and morals. The
church and the school house were the first things sought for after the cabin
home had been reared and a small patch of timber had been cleared away,
on which land was to be grown, the first crops upon which the hardy pio-
neer settler was to feed his little flock.
Wayne county was in no wise behind her sister counties in establish-
ing her school system, and year by year improved it until today no county
has better grades of public schools than are found here. At first this county,
in common with all sections of the United States at that early date, depended
on the subscription school for the primary education of their children.
PRIMITIVE SCHOOLS.
Perhaps no better description of the early-day schools in Wayne county
can be given the reader of today than to quote from the late Ben Douglas,
who had lived here and made a careful study of the growth of the school
systems of Ohio from the earliest times to the date he incorporated the fol-
lowing into a chapter of his “Wayne County History/' published in 1878.
It reads as follows :
“The primitive school house, as described to us, was eighteen feet
square, built of logs, round or hewn, as the caprice of the builders suggested.
It had a floor of split logs called puncheons; it was roofed with clapboards,
with ridge poles to hold them to their places and keep the wind from blow-
ing them away. At the one end was a fireplace, — in fact, in many instances,
the whole end was devoted to such use, and therein were rolled and tumbled
in immense back-logs. At the other end was a door with latch and string,
and a window was formed by sawing out a section of a log, inserting therein
a light frame and stretching over the same some white oiled paper.
“In the center of the room were slabs which were used for benches,
without backs, and these were set on feet, or sticks set up perpendicularly at
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each end. Boards arranged at a slope were fixed for the ‘on scholars,’ on
which to put their copy books and slates.
“These early schools were gotten up by subscriptions, that is, parents
subscribed so much for each member of the family ; if they sent one, so much;
if more, that much in proportion more. These subscriptions were usually for
a quarter, and the school commonly began November ist. Though it was
a short term, it was sometimes long for the teacher. The instructor was
most anybody they could pick up; sometimes an intelligent neighbor, some-
times the peripatetic gentleman ‘from York State.' In those days the teacher
was held in great esteem, aye, reverence. He was a master, and was sup-
posed to know everything. He could solve puzzles, do sums, make capital
letters, sometimes he drank nothing but milk, and his last and most un-
fortunate gift was that he could sing. He always kept ‘order’ in the school
room, his weapons to make the scholars ‘behave' consisting of a rule and a
well-filled quiver of ‘gads.’
“When he touched somebody’s son he employed his whole intellect.
If perchance he thumped him he did it bodily — boldly. If he struck his
knuckles with his club, he did it with refined courage; if he pulled his ears —
why this was government. At this, the father thought the child was being
instructed. He pretty nearly always boarded with the scholars, and of nights
he would call them around him, the little trembling urchins, with black
marks on their tender backs which resulted from his cruel hammerings
during the day, and pat them on the head and cheeks and tell the parents
how apt and smart they were; that this was Cincinnatus and that a Cicero.
The father would take it ‘all in’ and reflectively remark to his good wife
of the fame that was sure to come upon them.
“Sometimes the scholars would ‘bar’ their teacher out on Christmas
or New Year’s day and then his Satanic majesty was to pay with a depleted
purse. He might break in the door, or crawl through a window, or jump
down the chimney; or if there were any big scholars in attendance, he would
‘cave in’ and promise to ‘set ’em up’ the next day. The ‘treat’ he would fur-
nish would be composed of candles, cakes and gimcracks. On the last day
of the school the heads of the family would assemble and the master would
use some endearing terms to parting children and their fond fathers
and mothers.
“The subjects taught were the three rules — celebrated rules — ‘Readin’,
Ritin’ and Rithmetic’ to the rule of Three. If the teacher said he could
go this far he was hired with no further examination. If a pupil could bound
the United States he was considered classic and fit to preach or practice law.
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Spelling was a big thing, for the masters were always spellers themselves,
and in addition ‘worked out hard sums’ of the neighborhood. The children
sometimes had a long distance to go to school, and in such cases their
parents made furrows with their plows through the woods, or ‘blazed the
trees’ as guides for them. Here they would gather, boys and girls, the
omnipresent ‘big brother’ likewise putting in his appearance. The boys in
those days, too, kept busy their eyes to all fun going on, and occasionally
they took their dogs along, Jew’s harps, jackknives, and frequently a pistol
was taken with them.”
They all voted for long recesses and short recitations. But under all
these circumstances they managed to make some acquirements, and proved
to be highly useful members of society when they grew to manhood and
womanhood. To these back-woods pupils we are today greatly indebted for
the many blessings we enjoy, for when the times were ripe and the ques-
tions of improving the school system came up for them to decide, they knew
the need of a change and always voted right.
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM.
With the advancing of the decades, the settlers of Wayne county heralded
with almost one accord the advent of better schools and they were soon
patterned after some one of the older Eastern states.
The adoption of the new state constitution gave a new impetus to the
educational affairs of Wayne county. The enactment of the first general
law upon this subject, dated April 14, 1853, imparted a giant impulse to
the cause and progress of the public schools of this county. This was an
entirely new school law, on the free school system plan. This law was
prepared by a senate committee, consisting of Hon. Harvey Rice, of Cuy-
ahoga county, Hon. George Rex, of Wayne county, and Hon. Alonzo Cush-
ing, of Gallia county. Its provisions were grand and beneficent.
Wayne county people seemed from the first to grasp the intent of this
new law and at once were eager to take advantage of the same. Among
the first townships to move under the law was Plain, and the first school
house built under the new law was what is known as “People’s College,” in
sub-district No. 7. It should here be stated, however, that, as is nearly
always the case in any innovation, it was met with a stout opposition; but
under the direction of Hon. Benjamin Eason, Jacob Welty and Robert C.
Beard, the local directors, the sub-district completed its building, which
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served as a model for many years for other sub-districts of Wayne county.
From time to time various amendments have been made to that school
law; but in all subsequent legislation upon this subject, the salient features
of the original law have been retained; and today the same system of free
education to all the youth of the state remains as a monument to the wisdom,
intelligence, justice and genius of the framers of the first law.
SMITHVTLLE HIGH SCHOOL.
What was quite an educational institution, at an early day, was the
Smith ville high school, established in August, 1865, at Smithville, Green
township. Prof. J. B. Eberly was the first teacher and became principal
of the school. In 1867 money was raised by subscription to the amount of
five thousand dollars to build a building to take the place of the old
“Synagogue,” or Presbyterian church. By 1878 it was reported to be in
flourishing condition, \vith buildings in all valued at twenty thousand dollars.
The average yearly attendance had, up to that time, been two hundred and
seventy-five students, of both sexes. A large per cent of the local school
teachers up to that date had been educated at this most excellent institu-
tion. The school had no endowment, nor had it received any gifts except
the original subscription of five thousand dollars.
The officers in 1877-78 were: President, Rev. D. Kosht, of Smithville;
secretary, B. Musser; treasurer, Rev. James Baldwin; board of trustees, Ben-
jamin Hershey, of Canton; D. B. Hotchiss, of Limaville; David Shisler, of
North Lawrence; Rev. John Excell, of Limaville; David Ecker, of Burbank;
John Williams, of Smithville.
With the settlement of the county, the coming of railroads and build-
ing up of towns, and the growth of the Wooster University, this school
largely dropped out of sight.
The public schools of Wooster will be treated in their proper place in
the chapter on the “City of Wooster.”
FIRST SCHOOLS OF WAYNE COUNTY TOWNSHIPS.
The first school taught in Chippewa township was near Doylestown.
The first school in Milton township was taught in a log shanty in 1817,
by William Doyle, where the Knupp church later stood. It Was twenty by
twenty-four feet in size. In the winter the room was so cold that the
scholars’ ink would freeze while they were writing. This was a subscription
school.
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In Congress township the first school was taught by John Totten, in the
first cabin ever erected there. The first school house built for such purposes
was in 1819.
In Green township the first school was taught in 1818 by Peter Kane,
a student of Oxford, England. The first school house was erected on the
northwest quarter of section 23, and was a log cabin eighteen by twenty-two
feet in size.
In Sugarcreek township the first school building erected was in Dalton,
the site being where the cemetery was later located. The first teacher was
Peter Vorrhes. In the township of Sugarcreek the first school was taught
by Samuel Cook.
In Franklin township one of the very earliest school houses was that
long known as Polecat school house, built on what was later known as the
Stephen Harrison farm. Daniel Daringer donated an acre of land for
school house purposes.
In Plain township, the first teacher was John Cassiday, in about 1816.
The first school house erected in Clinton township was called the “New-
kirk” building, being situated on Henry Newkirk's land, near the stream
issuing from the big spring and where the road crosses it. It contained three
log benches for the children to be seated upon. The fireplace ran along
the entire end of the house. The first teacher was Theory Parker, of Holmes
county, who received seventy-five cents a week for her wages.
In Saltcreek township the first school building was that on Jacob Beer-
bower’s farm. The Fredericksburg school house was erected in 1828.
SCHOOLS AT SHREVE.
The village of Shreve has always paid much attention to the school sys-
tem, and had most excellent public schools from the very earliest day of free
schools. In 1858 the corporation limit of the village was constituted into
one district for school purposes. May 1st, that year, a board was elected
and it was decided to build a small brick school house, which was carried
out at an expense of seven hundred and eighty-eight dollars. Edwin Old-
royd was the first to teach in the new building. The first members of the
board of education at Shreve were as follows: John Robison, W. S. Bat-
tles. Henry Everly. Albert Richardson, Daniel Bertolett and W. G. Crossnrm.
In May, 1867, it was found necessary to build a new school house, and
the present structure, in part, was erected. It is a fine two-story building
on the high eminence overlooking the village. Here have been held many
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terms and school years of the best of modern-day public schools, and from
the place have gone forth into the world many useful and well-educated men
and women.
CANAAN ACADEMY.
Canaan Academy was one of the first educational institutions in Wayne
county, located at Windsor. The building, a two-story frame, thirty-six by
forty-eight feet, was erected in 1842 by a stock company. This academy was
controlled by a board of directors, the first board consisting of John Paul,
M. D., Jonas Notestine, Justin Mills, Harvey Rice and Alfred Hotchiss.
The school was opened December 3, 1843, ‘with forty-seven pupils, under
the direction of Prof. C. C. Bomberger, A. B., who taught three years.
Reverends Barr and Barker had charge during the summer of 1847, being
succeeded, in the winter of 1847-48, by Prof. Isaac Notestine, who taught
with short intervals and remained in charge until 1863. After that year
the school was taught by a number of other professors until 1874, when it
was permanently closed, under Prof. J. W. Cummings. When Professor
Notestine was in charge in the winter of 1851, the house was burned, after
which a brick building was at once erected. The Canaan Academy was a
great educator for those living in Wayne and adjoining counties.
SCHOOL STATISTICS OF WAYNE COUNTY.
From the report of the state commissioner of common schools in August,
1876, the following has been taken, to show the contrast since then in school
matters in this county, as following it will be given the latest school reports.
In 1876 the amount paid teachers in high schools and primaries was
$52,797; amount for other expenditures, including the foregoing, making a
total of $121,101.
There were in the county, between the ages of six and twenty-one years,
13.473 white children and 9 colored: of this number there were between the
ages of sixteen and twenty-one 3,253: there were 6.228 boys and 6,645 girls;
5 male colored and 4 female colored.
At that date there were in Wayne county 138 sub-divisions, 11 separate
districts and 11 sub-districts included in separate districts. The total value
of school property in the several townships and separate districts was $243,562.
There were employed during the year ending August, 1876, a total of
320 teachers and 10,064 pupils enrolled; of this number there were 10,029
between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. The average attendance was
6-333-
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THE PRESENT STANDING OF WAYNE COUNTY SCHOOLS.
According to the latest authority, the following is the statistical standing
of the schools of this county for 1908:
Number of school houses in the county, 235 ; number of school rooms,
345; value of all school property in Wayne county, $563,800; number of
teachers employed, 254; monthly average wages for men in elementary
schools, $46; women, $44; high schools, men, $74; women, $50; boys of
school age, 5,352; girls, 5,042; total number enrolled in schools, 8,127;
average daily attendance, 6,048; number of high schools, 84; volumes in
school library, 12,936; rate of school tax (1908), eight and one-half mills
per dollar of taxable property ; number of high schools in village, special and
township districts in county, 15; the grades in the various districts are as
follows :
Applecreek, No. 3; Burbank, No. 3; Congress township, No. 3; Creston,
No. 1; Dalton, No. 2; Doylestown, No. 1; Fredericksburg, No. 2; Green
township, No. 2; Marshallville, No. 2; Milton township, No. 3; Orrville,
No. 1; Paint township, No. 3; Shreve, No. 2; Sterling, No. 2; West
Salem, No. 2.
CENTRALIZATION OF RURAL SCHOOLS.
The average rural school district has but fifteen pupils, and from that
number only ten upon an average attend school the full school year. There
are eight hundred small sub-districts in Ohio. There can be but little enthu-
siasm in so small a collection of children, either for the teacher or the
students.
The first law with reference to school centralization in Ohio counties
was passed April 17, 1894, and it was applicable to Kingsville township, Ash-
tabula county. A law of general application was enacted April 5, 1898. The
good results in Ashtabula county led many other townships in northern Ohio
to adopt the same system. In 1908 there were within the state one hundred
and eighty-six schools wholly or partly centralized.
ADVANTAGES OF CENTRALIZATION.
The following advantages have been set forth by the best educators of
this country regarding the combining of the smaller district country schools
together into one centrally located union school, to which the children may be
transported to and from home by public conveyance at public expense :
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
It brings into the school pupils who would not otherwise enjoy its
advantages.
It insures a much better daily attendance of pupils and greatly reduces
the number of cases of tardiness and truancy.
It gives a better opportunity for a better classification of the schools
and proper grading of the pupils.
It encourages supervision and gives the superintendent a much more
favorable chance for thorough inspection of the work of the lower grades.
It limits the field of work for each teacher and gives an opportunity for
a more thorough preparation.
It gives a few classes to each teacher and longer recitation periods.
It gives the boys and girls of the rural schools the benefit of such special
branches as music, drawing, and agriculture, under a special teacher em-
ployed by the board of education.
It encourages the formation of good township high schools and gives
to the boys and girls in the township districts equal advantages with the
children of the city districts.
It tends to prevent difficulties which often arise on the way to and from
school and to protect the health and morals of the children.
School affairs can be administered more systematically. Better equip-
ment in the way of apparatus and library for the different grades can be pro-
vided for less money.
The children have the benefit of better school buildings and of modern
conveniences in the way of ventilation and sanitary arrangements.
Better janitor service can lie secured.
It helps to solve a difficult problem for the boards of education where
the enumeration in several sub-districts is exceedingly small and new build-
ings are needed.
It secures the employment and retention of better teachers.
It adds the stimulating influences of larger classes, with resulting enthu-
siasm and generous rivalry.
It offers the broader companionship and culture that comes from asso-
ciation.
It serves to bring the citizens of the township into closer relationship
and to awaken a deeper interest in the public schools.
Up to the present time — 1909 — W ayne county has not taken this mat-
ter up. There are some townships certainly in which it would not be prac-
tical. while in several others it might be well worth a trial.
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CHAPTER XI.
AGRICULTURE.
' By Prof. Charles E. Thorne, of Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station.
THE SOIL.
The foundation rock upon which the soil of Wayne county is laid, and
which has contributed the larger part of its material, is the series of argilla-
ceous shales and sandstones, usually yellowish olive in color, to which geolo-
gists have given the name Waverly. It is true that in the eastern and
southeastern portions of the county this formation is covered by the strata
belonging to the coal measures, but these strata are cut through by valleys
which extend down to the Waverly floor.
The upper strata of the Waverly, as found in the central and southern
parts of Wayne county, are soft, fine-grained shales, easily ground into dust,
only the deeper layers being sufficiently hard for building stone. The decom-
position of these shales gives rise to a silty soil, intermediate in texture
between clay on the one hand and sand on the other, its particles being so
fine and so loosely bound together that the smallest stream of water loosens
them from their surroundings and carries them to lower levels.
The soil of the county has been modified by the great sheet of moving
ice which once covered the greater part of Ohio, and which in some sections
exerted a tremendous influence in the formation of the soil; but in Wayne
county the effect of glacial action has been comparatively small, and even
where the drift material left by the glacier is most in evidence it consists
chiefly of sand and gravel produced by the grinding up of rocks lying a
short distance to the northward and very similar in character to those upon
which the drift is laid.
The flat, marshy plain which marks the divide between the drainage
towards Lake Erie to the nortli and the Ohio river to the south lies along
the boundary between Wayne and Medina counties, chiefly in the latter
county. As the drainage from this watershed has moved southward it has
03)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
at once begun the cutting of valleys, small and shallow at first, but growing
larger and deeper as the volume of water has been swollen by affluents from
the sides, until by the time the south half of the county is reached the entire
surface has been eroded into alternations of hill and valley, the hills, which
give such beauty to the landscape, being hills simply because the valleys have
been dug out between by the floods of ages.
That this cause is adequate to produce the effect no one can doubt who
has observed the result of a single heavy shower in a freshly plowed field,
or the gullying which results from a single season’s rainfall on a neglected
hillside.
The result of this tendency to wash is that the hillsides are covered with
but a thin sheet of soil, which, though giving good returns for a few years
after being put under the plow, soon begins to show the effect of excessive
cropping. On the higher and more level lands the soil sheet is thicker, and
its productiveness in consequence is more permanent than on the slopes where
the washing has carried away a larger proportion of the soil.
When the country was first visited by the white man it was covered with
a dense forest, and the first labor of the pioneer settler — and strenuous labor
it was — was expended in cutting away enough of this forest to give a small
field for cultivation.
The location of the pioneer home was determined by a spring, and the
multitudes of springs of pure water in Wayne county were a potent factor
in securing its rapid settlement. Near the spring the log cabin was built,
and around the cabin home the trees were cut away, the cleared area enlarg-
ing year by year, and for many years the axe and the rifle were the most
important implements on the farm — the one extending the area on which
bread could he produced, the other supplying a large part of the meat re-
quired to keep the axe and plow in motion.
As the springs were on the hillsides, it was on the hillsides, when not
too steep for cultivation, that the first fields were cleared: and on these hill-
sides the loose shales which constitute the upper rock strata lie so near the
surface as to give natural drainage — this formation being the cause of the
springs, as the water passes readily between the joints of the shales, to be
arrested and brought to the surface at lower levels by the denser strata
below.
Within a few years the earlier fields on these thin, hillside soils began to
show some indication of reduction in yield under the system of continuous
cropping, which was the logical system to a farmer who had wrested his
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little fields from their natural condition at such tremendous effort, and who
had, by the very exigencies of his situation, become more woodsman and
hunter than farmer; but by the time these symptoms had appeared the axe
had penetrated a little farther into the forest and other fields were ready to
respond to the plow with full harvests.
Tf these fields were on the more level summit lands where the soil sheet
was thicker they did not at first suffer materially from lack of drainage,
because the deeply penetrating tree roots as they decayed furnished drainage
channels to the rocks below.
The pioneer farmer, therefore, found in Wayne county a soil of such
physical texture as to be easily worked, so situated as to be perfectly under-
drained, and both soil and climate admirably adapted to the growth of winter
wheat, and the production of this cereal became the leading industry of the
county at an early date.
THE PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURE.
Ohio’s agriculture has passed through three general periods and is
now entering upon a fourth, namely:
1. The pioneer period (1800 to 1850).
2. The developmental period (1850 to 1880).
3. The expansion period (1880 to 1900).
4. The scientific period (since 1900).
THE PIONEER PERIOD.
During the first period the state was settled by the hardy pioneers, who
flowed into it along three principal lines of migration: (1) The New Eng-
land line, coming direct from the New England states — largely from Con-
necticut— or moving in after a temporary sojourn in New York, and settling
the country known as the Western Reserve and the region to the westward;
(2) the Pennsylvania line, consisting very largely of the people who have
come to be known as Pennsylvania Dutch, or Pennsylvania Germans, and of
Quakers, who occupied a large part of the middle of the state, and (3) the
Virginia-Carolina line, occupying the southern counties. There were some
cross-currents in this migration, as in the New England settlement at Mari-
etta, but the inflow into Wayne county was very largely of the Pennsyl-
vania Germans, a people noted everywhere for industry and frugality.
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During this period there were no cities within the state to be fed, and
none outside of it that it was practicable to reach with the ox-team trans-
portation of the earlier days, or with the six-horse Pennsylvania wagon which
soon made its appearance. There was no navigable stream in the county on
which to float away its produce, and the lake, at its nearest point, was forty
miles distant from the northern boundary of the county. The only practica-
ble method of marketing farm produce, therefore, was to convert it into meat-
producing animals and drive them across the mountains to the cities growing
up on the Atlantic coast, and the demand by these cities was very limited.
The clothing of the farmer’s family of that day was spun and woven at
home from flax and wool grown on the farm; all the food was produced at
home except salt, tea, coffee and spices. Sugar, if not a product of every farm
in the state, was found in maple groves scattered so generally over the state
as to be practically within a day’s journey with the ox-team from every
farm (one of the writer’s early recollections is of the annual bringing home
of the barrel of maple sugar, produced in the opposite side of his county).
The implements of husbandry were chiefly such as had been in use for
thousands of years. The plow had an iron share, made by the local black-
smith, and a wooden moldboard made by the farmer himself. The harrow
had wooden or clumsy iron teeth; the farmer’s hand was the only seed-
ing machine, just as it had been since the sower first went forth to sow;
he reaped his grain with an implement practically identical with the sickle
which Farmer Boaz had used three thousand years ago, and trampled it
out with oxen or threshed it with a flail of his own making, just as the
earliest farmer had done. Probably the actual cash paid out for the imple-
ments used on an ordinary farm, outside of the one wagon which served
every purpose for which a wheeled vehicle was required, did not exceed
twenty-five dollars.
The cast-iron plow made its appearance in the eastern states about the
beginning of the century, but did not come into common use in Ohio before
the thirties or later. The grain cradle appeared during the thirties. Seeding,
harvesting and threshing machinery followed slowly, so that at the state
fair, held in Cleveland in 1852, it is stated by Dr. N. S. Townshend in
Howe's “Historical Collections,” there were shown grain drills, corn plant-
ers, broadcast wheat sowers, corn shellers for horse and hand power, corn
and cob crushers and one- and two-horse cultivators.
The Ohio canal was completed in 1830. thus giving to the counties
along its route water transportation for their products, and the farmers of
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Wayne county began hauling their wheat to the shipping points along the
line of this canal. The Pittsburg, Ft. Wayne & Chicago railroad was built
during the early fifties, thus opening the era of steam transportation.
This mid-century period marks the transition between the agriculture
of the sickle and ox-cart on the one hand, and that of farm machinery and
steam transportation on the other, the transition between the ancient and
the modern.
In 1846 a slice was cut off the western side of Wayne county and added
to the new county of Ashland, so that the census statistics of 1850 are the
earliest data respecting the county as now constituted. This census gave
the county a 'population of 32,981. The collection of agricultural statistics
was begun in Ohio in 1850, but the statistics for Wayne county were not
collected until 1851. In 1853 the lands listed for taxation in the county were
appraised by the state board of equalization at a total of $7,707,222, or
$22.47 Per acre,* and the statistics collected by the township assessors show
the following annual average production of the principal farm crops and
numbers of farm animals for the nine-year period, 1851-59:
PRODUCTION OF CEREAL CROPS, 1 85 1 -59.
Crop. Acres. Bu. produced. Bu. per acre.
Wheat 38.557 485T38 12.6
Corn 20,641 560,547 26.8
Oats 19,198 486,787 25.3
Farm animals: Horses, 11,263; cattle, 26,710; sheep, 84,194; hogs,
29733-
If we estimate that ten sheep or hogs will consume about the same quan-
tity of feed as one cattle beast, the livestock kept during this period was
equivalent to about 49,366 cattle, or 100 cattle to 159 acres in the three
principal crops. It will be observed that there were nearly as many acres in
wheat as in corn and oats combined.
In addition to the crops above mentioned, an average area of 24,054
acres was reported as in meadow, 13,623 acres as in clover, and 6,936 acres
as in minor crops during this period, the minor crops including 2,323 acres
in barley, 1,296 acres in potatoes, 1,267 acres in flax, 1,130 acres in rye, 762
acres in buckwheat, 133 acres in sorghum and 25 acres in tobacco, making a
• Ohio Statistics, 1881, pp. 728—730.
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total of 123,000 acres in cultivation, including the meadow land, part of
which, no doubt, was permanent meadow.
THE DEVELOPMENT PERIOD.
During the thirty years, 1850 to 1880, mechanical invention wrought
greater changes in human industry than had taken place in all the preceding
ages. In agriculture this era Witnessed the substitution of the self-binding
harvester and steam thresher for the sickle and flail, and in long-distance
transportation the steam railway train on its steel track displaced the wagon
drawn by oxen or horses.
During this period several great wars occurred : The Crimean war dur-
ing the fifties; our own Civil war during the sixties, and the Franco-German
in 1870, each of which caused an abnormal demand for foodstuffs, which
the rapidly increasing facilities for production and transportation enabled the
Ohio farmer to profit by. In Wayne county the following averages were
maintained during the period 1860-69:
PRODUCTION OF CEREAL CROPS, 1860-69.
Crop. Acres. Bu. produced. Bu. per acre.
Wheat 33>9&2 447*546 131
Corn 24,217 777*919 32.1
Oats 19,989 640,527 32.0
Farm animals: Horses, 11,889; cattle, 29,258; sheep, 108,990; hogs,
3°>673. Total cattle equivalent, 54,913, or 100 to 143 acres in principal
crops.
The war period was one of labor scarcity, hence there was no increase
in the area under cultivation, while the high price of wool stimulated a great
increase of the sheep flocks. The reduction of the wool tariff soon after the
close of the war, combined with the cessation of the waste produced by the
war itself, resulted in lower prices for wool, which caused many to lose
their interest in sheep, and the number kept in the county diminished rapidly.
The Franco-German war at the beginning of the seventh decade of
the century contributed to the mtaintenance of high prices for foodstuffs,
and the area under cultivation in Wayne county was extended to a total of
95,527 acres in wheat, oats and corn, divided as below, while the livestock
was reduced to the equivalent of 49,447 cattle.
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PRODUCTION OF CEREAL CROPS, 1870-79.
Crops. Acres. Bu. produced. Bu. per acre.
Wheat 41,208 694,276 16.8
Corn 3°>°33 *>237,589 4i*2
Oats 24,286 838,010 34.2
Farm animals: Horses, 11,573; cattle, 29,713; sheep, 51,822; hogs,
29,787 ; a total equivalent to 49,447 cattle.
This was a period not only of large production but of fairly good prices,
the average December price of wheat for the United States being estimated
by the national department of agriculture for the ten years at 99.3 cents,
that of corn at 40.5 cents and that of oats at 33.7 cents. These values, it
is true, seemed low, after the nominally high prices based upon the inflated
currency of the war period, but as compared with what was to follow they
meant prosperity to the careful farmer, and the Wayne county farmer, as a
rule, was prosperous.
At the end of the decade the farms of the county were appraised for
taxation at a total of $12,975,053, or $37.66 per acre, an increase of 68
per cent over the valuation of 1853.
THE EXPANSION PERIOD.
The national statistics show that in 1870 nearly 19,000,000 acres of
wheat were harvested in the United States, yielding nearly 236,000,000
bushels. By 1880 the area in wheat had doubled, and the total yield had risen
proportionately. This sudden increase in production was due to the rapid
extension of railways through the west and northwest, on the one hand,
and to the improvement of agricultural machinery, especially to the perfec-
tion of the automatic binder, on the other. For a time the market absorbed
the increased production of wheat at remunerative prices, but by the early
eighties production had overtaken consumption and a depression of prices
set in which continued downward for ten years, falling to an average ex-
port price for the year ending June 30, 1896, of 65^ cents per bushel.
Not only did wheat values diminish, but those of livestock and its
products also, owing to the rapid development of the free range industry in
the West, and many farmers either abandoned altogether the keeping of live-
stock or greatly reduced the number kept, selling the grain, which had
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previously been fed, to the elevators, which started up at every railway station,
and endeavoring to recoup themselves for the low price per bushel of grain by
extending the area in crops so as produce more bushels. The trend in Wayne
county is shown by the following table, giving the average production of
the principal cereals and the livestock population for the ten years, 1880-89:
PRODUCTION OF CEREAL CROPS, 1880-89.
Crops. Acres. Bu. produced. Bu. per acre.
Wheat 55.739 942,013 16.9
Corn 3°.I89 1,035,890 34.3
Oats 22,519 817,430 36:2
Farm animals: Horses, 11,530; cattle, 27,922; sheep, 39,355; hogs,
27,620; total cattle equivalent, 46,150, or 100 cattle to 235 acres in the
principal crops.
The area in wheat, the cash crop, was increased from the average of
41,208 acres for the seventies to that of 55,739 acres for the eighties, an
increase of more than one-third, while the area in corn — the meat produc-
ing crop — remained stationary, and that in oats was diminished.
The introduction of commercial fertilizers in Ohio was practically coin-
cident with the development of the ranch and range industries of the West,
and during the decade under review the farmers of Wayne county expended
an annual average of $20,646 for such fertilizers, or thirty-nine cents for
each acre sown in wheat.
The course of cereal and livestock production in the county for the ten
years, 1890-99, is shown below:
PRODUCTION OF CEREAL CROPS, 1890-99.
Crops. Acres. Bu. produced. Bu. per acre.
Wheat 5 2,077 841,207 1 6. 1
Corn 35.084 1,180,766 33.6
Oats 25,242 888,872 34.9
Farm animals: Horses, 11,643; cattle, 22,258; sheep, 29,651; hogs,
24,935 : total cattle equivalent, 39.360, or 100 cattle to 285 acres in the prin-
cipal crops.
The wheat area is diminished and that of corn and oats is increased,
but the continued decrease of livestock shows that part of the corn and oats
have gone to the elevator as well as the wheat.
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The purchase of commercial fertilizers doubled during the period, the
average annual expenditure amounting to $41,643, or eighty cents for each
acre in wheat.
It is true that the wheat crop did not receive all the fertilizers used,
but much the larger part was given to that crop. Under this system the
yield of wheat, which had been brought to an average of 16.8 bushels per
acre for the seventies by the use of manure, was held at 16.9 bushels during
the eighties, but fell to 16.1 bushels during the nineties, while the yield of
com, which had reached 41.2 bushels during the seventies, went back to
34.3 bushels during the eighties, and that of oats, which rose from 34.2
bushels during the seventies to 36.2 bushels during the eighties, fell to 34.9
bushels for the nineties.
The use of fertilizers practically began during the eighties, so that the
high level of crop yields during the seventies was attained under the system
of livestock husbandry which had prevailed up to that period, and the in-
creasing expenditure for fertilizers during the next two decades was not
sufficient to maintain the yields at the level then attained.
The effect of the low prices which prevailed during the last decade of
the century is shown in the decennial appraisement at its close, under which
the farm lands of Wayne county were listed at a total valuation of $10,477,-
580, or $30.46 per acre.
This reduction in valuation, however, does not fully represent the actual
conditions. Very few farm buildings were constructed during this ten-year
period, and old buildings were left unpainted, so that the reputation of the
county for having the finest farm improvements in the state has been barely
maintained. When farms changed owners, it was on the basis of far lower
valuations than had been current twenty years earlier, and while there were
still a great many farmers in the county who were in comfortable financial
circumstances there were a great many more who found it necessary to prac-
tice very close economy.
Taking the present decade, the first of the new century, we find that
during the nine years, 1900 to 1908, the county's productions were as follows :
PRODUCTION OF CEREAL CROPS, I9OO-I908.
Crops. Acres. Bu. produced. Bu. per acre.
Wheat 44*649 822.674 18.4
Corn 36,376 1,380,826 38.0
Oats 29,164 1,139475 387
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Farm animals: Horses, 10,017; cattle, 22,645; sheep, 17,960; hogs,
24,089; total cattle equivalent, 36,867, or 100 cattle to 300 acres in the prin-
cipal crops.
During this nine-year period the annual expenditure for fertilizers has
amounted to $75,682.
These figures show that the area in wheat has been materially reduced,
while that in com and oats has been increased. They also show a material
increase in the yield per acre for all three of these crops, an increase due
in part to a better system of crop rotation, in part to better seasonal condi-
tions, and in part to the larger use of fertilizers.
THE SCIENTIFIC PERIOD.
By the close of the century practically all the land in the United States
which is susceptible of cultivation without irrigation was occupied with farms.
The range area was restricted to lands unfit for cultivation, and in many
cases these lands had been reduced in productiveness by too close pasturing.
The area sown in wheat was still being extended in the Northwest,
but the yield per acre was maintained only by bringing fresh lands under
the plow every year, as the yield was diminishing on the older soils. The
urban population was increasing so steadily, however, that with the advent
of the new century the proportion of the wheat crop exported fell to 24.7
per cent for the eight years, 1900-7, as against 33.1 per cent for the nineties,
29.9 per cent for the eighties and 24.6 per cent for the seventies, and this
notwithstanding the fact that the total production for the last period has
been nearly thirty per cent greater than for the preceding period and more
than double that of the seventies.
The climax of wheat production was reached in 1901, at nearly 50,000,-
000 acres, yielding nearly 750,000,000 bushels. No crop produced since
that date has equaled this record, either in area or total yield, and the price
of wheat has been gradually rising since the beginning of the century. There
will be a further expansion of wheat territory into the Canadian Northwest,
but it does not seem at all probable that the increase in area brought under
wheat from henceforth can more than keep pace with the increasing demand
from our growing population, and the outlook for remunerative prices for
wheat is certainly very favorable. This is a matter of prime importance to
Wayne county, for, as has already been stated, its soil and climatic conditions
are especially adapted to the culture of this cereal, as is shown by the promi-
nence it has occupied in the agriculture of the county throughout the period
under record.
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203
MINOR CROPS.
In addition to the area devoted to the four principal crops, com, oats,
wheat and hay, the statistics show the following areas devoted to other pur-
poses during the present decade:
AVERAGE AREAS,
1900-1908.
Acres.
Acres.
Rye
407
Sorghum, broom corn, etc.
. 87
Barley
60
Buckwheat
33
Potatoes
4,656
Orchards
• 5,328
Onions
247
Forest
.36,844
Tobacco
708
Waste
r 'jri/i
Flax
0
104
• 5>3y4
The potato crop has become one of great importance in Wayne county,
the soil being especially adapted to this crop, and the annual area in pota-
toes has increased from 3,000 acres in 1900 to 6,000 acres in 1908.
Wayne county is also a large producer of onions, grown on the muck
lands in the northern and eastern parts of the county, about 250 acres
being annually devoted to this crop.
Tobacco is grown in the northern part of the county, in the vicinity of
Sterling and Creston.
THE OHIO AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION.
In the spring of 1891 the State Legislature passed an act authorizing
the removal of the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station from its location
on the lands of the Ohio State University, in Columbus, to any county
in the state which would offer a donation to provide for the purchase
of lands and the erection of buildings for the use of the station. Within
a few weeks after the passage of this law offers were received by the board
of control of the station from the commissioners of Wayne, Clarke and
Warren counties, and after consideration of these offers and of the soil
conditions in the several counties, the offer of Wayne county was accepted
by the board of control and ratified by the people of the county, at a special
election held for that purpose.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Pursuant to the law, the county commissioners issued bonds for eighty-
five thousand dollars, the amount of the donation agreed upon. These
bonds were sold, the money paid into the state treasury, and three adjoin-
ing farms and two smaller tracts, comprising a total area of four hundred
and seventy acres, the nearest point being one mile south of the court house
in Wooster, were purchased and buildings were commenced.
At this point a dissatisfied citizen of the county entered suit to test
the constitutionality of the law under which the bonds of the county were
issued. The common pleas and circuit courts affirmed the validity of the
law, one of the circuit judges dissenting. The supreme court, by a vote
of four to one, reversed the decision of the lower courts on the ground
that the citizens of a county were being taxed for the support of an insti-
tution whose work was conducted for the benefit of the state at large, the
court holding that the superior advantages possessed by Wayne county
because of the location of the station on its soil and within convenient dis-
tance of its farmers did not offset the general principle above mentioned
This litigation occupied about two years, and necessarily retarded the
work of the station, as during its continuance the Legislature was unwilling
to appropriate money for permanent improvements, but after the final
decision of the supreme court the Legislature redeemed the bonds issued
by the county and began making appropriations for buildings and other
necessary equipment.
The station had been moved to its new location during the summer
of 1892, and immediately began preparing for experimental work by the
erection of greenhouses and other buildings and by tile-draining and lay-
ing off in permanent plots of one-tenth acre each about seventy-five acres.
After the settlement of the litigation affecting the station, the state appro-
priations became larger. Substantial buildings were erected and, the sta-
tion’s permanency being assured, its Work expanded year by year, being
carried on not only in the fields, orchards, barns and laboratories at Wooster,
but reaching out over the state in the establishment of substations or test-
farms in different sections, and in co-operative work carried on with the
assistance of hundreds of farmers, located in practically every county of
the state.
That the station has succeeded in some degree in serving the purpose
for which it was established is indicated by the increasing support given
it by the state. When first established, in 1882, the appropriation made
for its use was three thousand dollars. This was increased the next year
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
205
to five thousand dollars, and remained at that sum until 1887, when the
national government undertook the support of an agricultural experiment
station in every state under an act introduced by Hon. W. H. Hatch, of
Missouri, and hence called the “Hatch Act,” and which provides for the
annual appropriation to each state and territory from the United States
treasury of fifteen thousand dollars for this purpose.
On the passage of this act the state withdrew its support from the
Ohio station, but after a year or two the Legislature began the appropria-
tion of small amounts, for special purposes, beginning with one of two thou-
sand dollars, made in 1889, for a small greenhouse. These special appropria-
tions have been increased from year to year until in 1909 the total amount
directly appropriated to the station reached one hundred and eighteen thou-
sand dollars, besides the privilege of using several thousand dollars’ worth
of paper for the printing of its bulletins.
In 1906 the Hatch Act was supplemented by a second national law,
introduced by the late Henry C. Adams, of Wisconsin, and which provides
a fund, beginning with five thousand dollars and increasing by two thou-
sand dollars each year until the total shall amount to fifteen thousand dol-
lars, and which is known as the Adams fund. This fund is strictly re-
stricted to the purposes of scientific research, and is all the more useful on
account of this fact, because it permits the undertaking of investigations
dealing with fundamental principles, a class of investigations which some-
times seem to have but little practical application, and yet out of which
have come results of the highest usefulness to humanity.
As at present organized the station’s work is divided into the depart-
ments of administration, agronomy (or field crops), animal husbandry,
botany (including study of seeds and of diseases of plants), chemistry,
co-operative experiments, entomology, forestry, horticulture, nutrition and
soils, each department having a specialist at its head with one or more
scientific assistants and clerks and laborers, the staff of the station during
1909 reaching a total of one hundred and fifty persons.
In addition to the land occupied by the station in Wayne county, it
has a test farm of three hundred acres in Meigs county, on which the
problems peculiar to the hilly regions of southeastern Ohio are being studied,
and one of one hundred and twenty-five acres at Strongsville, in southern
Cuyahoga county, devoted to the study of the thin, white clay soils of that
region, while it holds under ten-year lease a farm of fifty-three acres at
Germantown, Montgomery county, devoted in part to the culture of tobacco
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
and in part to the study of soil fertility, and two fields, one of twenty acres
at Findlay, Hancock county, and one of ten acres at Boardman, Mahoning
county, which are being occupied under perpetual lease as demonstration
fields.
On these various tracts are permanently located more than two thou-
sand plots of land, the larger portion containing one-tenth acre each, and
of the treatment and produce of which the station has a definite record,
reaching over twelve to sixteen years in many cases.
In addition to the study of soil fertility, some of the more important
features of the station's work are the comparison of varieties of cereals,
forage crops, vegetables and fruits — more than one thousand varieties of
fruits being under observation in its orchard — the study of methods for the
control of insects and fungous diseases of plants; the nutrition of animals
and the various problems connected with forestry.
As the station is located in Wayne county, and on a soil fairly repre-
senting that of the county as a whole, its study of soil fertility is of great
importance to this county. This study has demonstrated that it is easily
possible and thoroughly practicable to produce much larger crops than the
average of those now grown in the county, as the station has produced thirty
to forty bushels of wheat to the acre as an average for ten-year periods, or
larger in its experimental work, with corresponding yields of corn, oats and
clover, and is duplicating these yields in its general farm work, on ten-acre
fields. These results, moreover, have been accomplished by methods which
have paid the cost of the increase and left a large margin of clear profit;
methods which are in reach of every farmer, however straitened his cir-
cumstances, and which, when put in operation, will steadily increase the
productiveness of the soil.
Some of the farmers in the county are already applying these methods,
in whole or in part, and are obtaining results which confirm those shown
at the station. These methods consist simply in draining such land as
needs drainage ; in the practice of a systematic crop rotation, in which clover
or a similar crop is grown every' third or fourth year; in the conversion
of the corn, hay and straw into manure, the careful saving of this manure
and its reinforcement with some carrier of phosphorus, to replace that car-
ried away in the wheat and milk, and bones and tissues of the animals sold ;
in the use of lime and in the careful tillage which is now generally prac-
ticed.
Much of this work involves labor only, and its execution can be gradu-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
207
ally accomplished by applying to it a part of the labor which is now wasted
by tilling two or three acres to get the produce that one acre should yield.
THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE IN WAYNE COUNTY.
But the present yield of wheat in Wayne county is far short of an*
easily possible and thoroughly practicable attainment. One of the three ad-
joining farms purchased by the experiment station on its removal to Wayne
county in 1892 had been rented for many years previous to its purchase
by the station, and on this farm a series of experiments in the maintenance
and increase of soil fertility by the use of systematic crop rotation, with
fertilizers and manures, was begun in 1893. These experiments have now
been in progress for sixteen years, and following are some of the results
attained :
In one experiment, com, oats, wheat, clover and timothy are grown
in a five-year rotation on five tracts of land, each crop being grown every
season. One-third of the land is left continuously without fertilizers or
manure, and on this area the average yields per acre have been as below:
YIELDS OF UNFERTILIZED LAND IN FIVE-YEAR ROTATION :
First 5 yrs.
Second 5 yrs.
Third 5 yrs.
1894-8.
1899-03.
1904-8.
Corn, bushels
319
30.8
31.0
Oats, bushels
3°-9
28.3
34-5
Wheat, bushels
9-3
8.6
13-7
Clover hay, tons
9i
•74
I.OI
Timothy hay, tons . . . .
1.27
1. 14
i-57
During the same five-year periods under consideration the average yields
per acre in Wayne county, as computed from the statistics collected by the
township assessors, have been as follows:
AVERAGE YIELDS OF CROPS IN WAYNE COUNTY:
First 5 yrs. Second 5 yrs. Third 5 yrs.
1894-8.
1899-03.
1904-8.
Corn, bushels
36.6
390
37-5
Oats, bushels
36.3
42.9
36-5
Wheat, bushels
15-3
17.1
19.4
Hay, tons
1.22
1.28
1.23
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
These county yields are considerably larger than the unfertilized station
yields, but during these three periods the county expended the following
sums for fertilizers, these fertilizers being used chiefly on the’ wheat crop;
First period, $40,216 per annum; second period, $59,830 per annum; third
period, $88,445 Per annum.
Live stock equivalent to about one head of cattle to three acres in corn,
oats and wheat has also been kept during the three periods.
The considerable decrease in the clover yields at the station during the
second five years of this test called attention to the lack of lime in the soil,
and, beginning with the crop of 1900, lime was applied to half the land in
the test as it \vas being prepared for corn, using burnt lime at the rate of a
ton per acre, or ground limestone in double that quantity, and spreading it
over both fertilized and unfertilized land. To this liming, therefore, is to
be ascribed a part of the increase shown during the last five-year period.
Each of the five tracts used in this test is divided into thirty plots of
one-tenth acre each. Plot twro in each tract, or half an acre in total, has
received every five years 320 pounds per acre of acid phosphate; 80 pounds
each on corn and oats and 160 pounds on wheat. The average yields on
these plots have been as below :
YIELDS FROM ACID PHOSPHATE :
First 5 yrs. Second 5 yrs. Third 5 vrs.
1894-8. 1899-03. 1904-8.
Corn, bushels 36.0 41.9 40.3
Oats, bushels 37.6 37.4 45.7
Wheat, bushels 12.3 18.7 24.1
Clover hay, tons 1.06 1.01 1.58
Timothy hay, tons 1.44 1.40 1.93
The acid phosphate has produced a considerable increase of crop, both
before and after liming, showing that this soil is hungry for phosphorus.
If we value acid phosphate at a fraction over $16.00 per ton, or $2.60 for
the 320 pounds used on each rotation, and rate corn at 40 cents per bushel,
oats at 30 cents, wheat at 80 cents, hay at $8.00 per ton. stover at $3.00
and straw at $2.00, the total net increase due to the 320 pounds of acid
phosphate, after paying for the fertilizer, has been worth $5.90 for the first
five years, $14.77 f°r ^ie second five years and $21.72 for the third five
years.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
200
The cost of the lime is not deducted for the third period, because both
fertilized and unfertilized land was limed, and other comparisons, not shown
in these statements, show that the cost of liming has been much more than
recovered in the general increase of crop. Not only has the lime increased
the unfertilized yield, but it has augmented the effect of the fertilizers.
Under this application of acid phosphate the yields at the station and
for the county show comparatively little difference during the first two
periods, but with the addition of lime at the station the yields for the third
period are decidedly greater than those for the county. It will be observed
that the county yields of corn and oats show a marked falling off during the
third period. The increased yield of wheat and hay is easily accounted for
by the greatly increased use of fertilizers, but the hay increase in the county
is much smaller than that at the station, where the additional expenditure
has been for lime instead of fertilizer.
On another series of plots (No. n) the same dressing of acid phosphate
has been applied, but re-enforced with 480 pounds of nitrate of soda and
260 pounds of muriate of potash, the whole application being divided between
the three cereal crops, and increasing the total cost to $23.50 per acre for
each rotation ; the outcome has been as below :
YIELDS FROM COMPLETE FERTILIZER:
First 5 yrs.
Second 5 yrs.
Third 5 yrs,
1894-8.
1899-03.
1904-8.
Corn, bushels
413
49-9
54-i
Oats, bushels
43-6
52-5
53-5
Wheat, bushels
20.5
27-5
33- 1
Clover hav, tons
1 .48
1-3*
1.92
Timothy hay, tons . . . .
1.65
2.30
The increase from this treatment has had the following values over the
yields of the unfertilized land: First five years, $26.39; second five years,
$42.43; third five years, $49.96. Deducting the cost of the fertilizer, the
net gain has been: For the first five years, $2.80; for the second five years,
$18.93; f°r the five years, $26.46.
This treatment, therefore, enormously expensive as it has been, has
produced a greater net profit than any partial application of fertilizers.
As has been stated alxave, of the total cost of the fertilizer, $20.90 was
fi4)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
spent for nitrogen and potash and only $2.60 for phosphorus. Whatever
system of agriculture we may follow, except the production of butter or
sugar, there must be some loss of phosphorus, as this element is carried away
from the farm in large quantity in the cereal grains and in the bones and
milk of animals, so that if the supply in the soil is to remain undiminished
there must be a systematic return, either through the purchase of fertilizing
substances or of feeding stuffs; but if all the hay, straw and stover and a
considerable part of the grain produced on the farm be fed there and the
resultant manure carefully saved and returned to the soil, there will be but
little loss of potassium, since the greater part of this element consumed
by the plant in its growth is left in the stem and leaves. Most of the nitro-
gen contained in the coarse feeds will also be recovered in the manure, while
the growing of leguminous crops for feeding will tend to replace the losses
of this element. If, therefore, it were possible to produce on the farm the
nitrogen and potassium required to produce the yield shown on Plot 1 1 in
this experiment, leaving only the phosphorus to purchase, the net gain would
be greatly augmented.
On another part of this same farm corn, wheat and clover have been
grown in a three-year rotation since 1897, in a comparison of different meth-
ods of treating barnyard manure. One-third of this land also has been left
continuously without fertilizer or manure, and its yield per acre has been as
below :
YIELDS OF UNFERTILIZED LAND IN THREE-YEAR ROTATION.
First 6 yrs.
1897-02.
Corn, bushels 41. 1
Wheat, bushels 8.5
Clover hay, tons .84
Second 6 yrs.
1903-8.
27.6
CF3
175
The low yield of wheat during the first period was partly due to Hes-
sian fly; the corn crop shows that the growing of clover one year in three
on this land, which had previously been largely depleted of its fertility by
exhaustive cropping, has not been sufficient to maintain the rate of pro-
duction.
During the periods over which thisltest have been in progress the county
yields have been as follows :
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
2 1 1
AVERAGE YIELDS OF CROPS IN WAYNE COUNTY:
First 6 yrs.
Second 6 yrs.
1897-02.
1903-8.
Corn, bushels
39-5
36.°
Wheat, bushels,
19-5
Hay, tons
i-34
1.40
On Plot 15 in this test barnyard manure has been applied at the rate of
eight tons per acre, the manure being taken from an open barnyard, after
several months' exposure to the weather, and plowed under for com, the
wheat and clover following without any further manuring or fertilizing.
The outcome has been as follows:
YIELDS FROM OPEN-YARD MANURE:
First 6 yrs.
1897-02.
Corn, bushels . 55.0
Wheat, bushels 15.6
Clover hay, tons .98
Second 6 yrs.
1903-8.
47*4
22.5
i-57
At the valuations previously employed, the increase due to the manure
has been worth $16.00 per acre, or $2.00 per ton of manure, during the
first period, and $22.73 F^1* acre> or $2-&4 per ton of manure, during the
second.
Alongside of the land thus treated another plot has received the same
quantity of fresh manure, made from the same animals, but taken directly
from the stable to the field, without exposure to the weather. The yields
from this treatment have been as below :
YIELDS FROM FRESH STABLE MANURE.
First 6 yrs.
1897-02.
Corn, bushels 59.2
Wheat, bushels 17.6
Clover Hay, tons 1.25
Second 6 yrs.
1903-8.
57-i
23*7
2.02
In this case the increase during the first period has been worth $21.24
per acre, or $2.65 per ton of manure, and during the second period $30.35
per acre, or $3.80 per ton of manure.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
On another plot in this test the fresh manure has had acid phosphate
mixed with it, at the rate of 40 pounds per ton of manure, a few weeks be-
fore spreading the manure on the land. The result of this treatment is
shown below :
YIELDS FROM PHOSPHATED FRESH MANURE ;
Corn, bushels . .
Wheat, bushels .
Clover hay, tons
First 6 yrs.
1897-02.
• • 63,5
• • 23.4
1.90
Second 6 yrs.
i9°3-8.
65-3
29.6
2.44
The total value of the increase from this treatment has amounted to
$33.36 for the first period and $43.56 for the second, or $3.87 and $5.12 per
ton of manure, after deducting $2.60 per acre for the cost of the 320 pounds
of acid phosphate used on the manure.
In other words, the combination of 320 pounds of acid phosphate, cost-
ing $2.60, with nitrate of soda and muriate of potash costing $20.90, has
produced on five acres of land during the last five years an average total
increase worth $50.00 per acre, or $10.00 per acre annually, while the com-
bination of the sfame quantity of acid phosphate with eight tons of fresh
stable manure has produced on three acres during the same period an increase
to the value of $43.50, or $14.52 per acre annually. The eight tons of
manure, therefore, have produced an effect 40 per cent greater than that
caused by $20.90 expended in the most effective carriers of fertilizer-nitrogen
and potash.
It may be objected that these experiments have been made on such
small areas of land that they are not a safe guide to general farm practice.
Following is the answrer to this objection :
Another part of the farm belonging to the station has been used for the
comparison of varieties of corn, oats and wheat, these crops being grown in
succession and followed by one year in clover, thus making a four-year
rotation. The work w-as begun in 1893, and ten acres of land is devoted to
each crop every season, the entire test including forty acres.
For the first ten years it \vas the practice to plant the corn on clover sod,
without any manure or fertilizer. The oats, following the corn, was like-
wise left untreated, while the wheat received a top dressing of open-yard
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
213
manure, applied after plowing and before seeding, at the rate of about nine
tons per acre. The result of this treatment was a ten-year average yield of
48.7 bushels of corn, followed by 52.2 bushels of oats, 19.9 bushels of wheat,
and 2.7 tons of hay.
Beginning with 1904, the system was changed, and the clover sod in-
tended for com was dressed during the fall and early winter with phos-
phated manure, produced by steers or dairy cows and kept under cover until
the field was ready for it, when it was hauled out and spread at the rate of
about twelve tons per acre. After the manure was plowed under lime was
applied to the surface and harrowed in at the rate of one ton per acre. The
oats, as previously, followed the corn without treatment, but the wheat re-
ceived a complete fertilizer instead of manure, the fertilizer being made up
from tankage, steamed bone meal, acid phosphate and muriate of potash
for the fall application, followed by nitrate of soda in April, the materials
being used at a total rate of 350 to 400 pounds per acre and mixed in such
proportions as to give a percentage composition for the fall application of
about 4 per cent, ammonia, 14 to 16 per cent phosphoric acid and 3 to 4 per
cent potash.
The outcome of this treatment Has been an increase in the corn yield
to an average per acre of 73.8 bushels for the five years, 1904 to 1908, fol-
lowed by averages of 55.1 bushels of oats, 36.6 bushels of wheat and 4.33
tons of hay.
Comparing these yields with the unfertilized yields obtained in the
five-year rotation first described, we have a gain of 42.8 bushels of corn;
20.6 bushels of oats; 22.9 bushels of wheat and 3.32 tons of hay, the whole
having a value of $68.18. Deducting from this $2.00 for the floats used on
the manure, $6.40 for the fertilizer used on the wheat and $2.60 for half
the cost of liming, since only half the land in the five-year rotation had been
limed, we have a balance of $57.18, or $4.76 for each ton of manure used.
The soil upon which these experiments have been made is certainly
no better naturally than the average soils of Wayne county. It is true that
it has the advantage of being well drained, which is an important point, but
the topography of the county as a whole is such as to make drainage easily
practicable wherever it is needed. Let us, therefore, consider the possible
effect of applying to Wayne county as a whole the system of management
which has produced the results above described.
During the five years, 1904 to 1908, the statistics of crop production
for the county show the following average areas and yields:
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Crop. Acres. Yield per acre. Total yield.
Corn 36,054 36.9 bu. 1,330,782 bu.
Oats 30,590 36.5 bu. 1,117,919 bu.
Wheat 44,391 19.4 bu. 860,753 bu.
Hay 53,271 1.43 tons 76,061 tons
During the same period livestock equivalent to 37,000 cattle was kept,
and the annual expenditures for fertilizers amounted to $88,445. The total
area in the four crops amounted to 164,000 acres. Let us compute the possi-
ble yield on this area had 41,000 acres been allotted to each of the four crops,
and had the yields been 60 bushels of com, 45 of oats, 30 of wheat and 3 tons
of hay, or about 80 per cent of the yields obtained at the station during the
same period:
Crop. Acres. Yield per acre. Total yield.
Corn 41,000 60 bu. 2,460,000 bu.
Oats 41,000 45 bu. 1,845,000 bu.
Wheat 41,000 30 bu. 1,230,500 bu.
Hay 41,000 3 tons 123,000 tons
In round numbers this would have given 1,100,000 bushels more corn,
700,000 bushels more oats, 380,000 bushels more wheat and 47,000 tons more
hay than was actually harvested, the whole worth a million and a third of dol-
lars, estimating corn at 40 cents a bushel, oats at 30 cents, wheat at 80 cents
and hay at $8.00 per ton.
Of course these larger yields would not have been produced without
extra cost, the first item of which would have been better drainage. As a
whole, Wayne county is fortunate in its natural drainage: the rolling topog-
raphy of most of the county gives excellent surface drainage, and the large
areas in which the loosely stratified shales lie within a few feet of the surface
give the most perfect underdrainage, so that there is comparatively little
artificial drainage required. While no data are available from which anything
more than the merest guess Can be made as to the amount of artificial drain-
age needed, I believe that an expenditure of $25 per acre on half the area
under cultivation, or $2,000,000 for the county, would be sufficient, if well
directed, to put the whole into position to produce the crops above indicated.
Next to drainage comes the need of lime. There are a few fields in
the county, chiefly on newly-cleared land, on which this need is not yet
urgent, but the territory over which lime must be applied before full har-
vests can be obtained is steadily increasing, and it is only a question of
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time when the systematic application of lime must find a place in the agri-
culture of this county.
Next to liming comes the production of more manure and the more
careful use of that which is produced. The present livestock of the county
produces about 165,000 tons of manure each winter, or about half enough
to dress 41,000 acres of corn at the rate of eight tons per acre, provided it
were saved and used without waste. But the livestock of the county should
be doubled, even though it might sometimes be necessary to charge a part
of the cost of handling the livestock to the soil fertility account. In the
long run and under judicious management livestock will pay its way and
leave the manure as an unincumbered asset.
The money expended for fertilizers on the average of the last five years
($88,000 annually) would purchase 6,000 tons of acid phosphate, or 10,000
tons of floats, if bought in car loads. This would be sufficient to give each
ton of the manure from 75,000 cattle a dressing of 40 pounds of acid phos-
phate or 60 pounds of floats, and would thus restore to the soil all the phos-
phorus withdrawn by present cropping, and begin the restoration of that
which has been drawn from the soil and shipped out of the county under
the system of husbandry which has hitherto prevailed.
For a time the wheat crop would respond profitably to additional ferti-
lizing, but under this system the quantity of fertilizers required to be used
separately from the manure would gradually diminish.
To sum up, let us estimate the annual expenditure which would prob-
ably be required to produce the yield above indicated :
The drainage of the land is a permanent improvement, and its cost
should therefore be distributed over a term of years. Let us charge 10 per
cent of the drainage cost annually, 6 per cent to interest and 4 per cent to
a sinking fund to liquidate the principal.
The station's experiments indicate that lime should be used at the rate
of about a ton per acre at the first application, but that after the acidity of
the soil is once neutralized less lime is required. The annual application of
half a ton of lime per acre to the corn crop would probably be a liberal esti-
mate.
The present expenditure for fertilizers would cover the cost of phos-
phating the manure, but for a time it will pay to continue fertilizing the
wheat crop at a rate even more liberal than that now practiced.
The feeding of livestock will in some cases involve more labor than
would be required to haul the produce to market, but in the majority of
cases probably less. There will, of course, be much more produce to handle.
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about 100,000 tons of grain and hay, in fact, but will be largely offset by
the additional value of the stover and straw. Let us, however, allow one
dollar per ton, or $100,000 per annum, for this extra work. Our account
will then stand as below :
Drainage, interest and sinking fund $200,000
Liming, one-half ton per acre 100.000
Additional fertilizers 100,000
Extra labor 100,000
Total $600,000
This will still leave about three-quarters of a million dollars annually in
the Wayne county farmers’ pockets over and above what they are now
getting.
There are those who will say that it is impossible for them to make the
expenditure necessary to bring their land into the condition required to make
these yields, but a large part of this expenditure is in the form of labor,
and it would be better to devote a part of the labor which is now expended
in working two or three acres to get the produce of one in draining and fer-
tilizing the one acre, even though another acre lay idle for a year or so in
consequence.
WAYNE COUNTV AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY.
This society was organized in 1849. Its first president was Robert
Reed, of Dalton, Sugarcreek township. The first address was delivered
by William Turner, then of Wooster, but later of Cleveland. The first fair
was held in the grove near the later residence of D. Q. Liggett, where the
exhibitions were continued until 1854.
January 24, 1859, the society contracted with E. Quinby, Jr., for eight
acres of land on North Market street, where until 1869 its exhibitions were
held. For numerous reasons these grounds were sold and others purchased
of Henry Myers, consisting of twenty-four acres, a short distance to the
west of Wooster. Here the buildings have been made of a permanent char-
acter. There is also much interest in speeding of fast horses, annually, on a
fine race course. The annual exhibits of farm, garden and orchard from all
over Wavne county are indeed a credit to the management and patrons
themselves. While the trotting horse craze lias somewhat taken a prominent
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place in the annual fair, yet the display of agricultural products and of fine
livestock, together with beautiful exhibits made by the ladies of the county,
in way of fancy work, art and all that beautifies the home, is annually in
evidence in large quantities.
The present (1909) officers of the association that owns and manages
this county fair are as follows: John C. McClaran, president; J. S. McCoy,
vice-president ; W. A. Wilson, treasurer ; G. J. Eybright, secretary.
THE PROGRESSIVE FARMERS' ASSOCIATION.
Several of the farmers residing in the vicinity of Wooster, who felt
that their interests would be greatly enhanced by organization, gathered
at a meeting called for February 21, 1888, at the home of R. D. Firestone,
south of Wooster, to discuss the subject of organizing. The result was
the above-named society, which has had an unbroken existence to the pres-
ent date. A yearly program is carefully prepared by a committee appointed by
the president. These meetings are held at the homes of the membership.
All subjects pertaining to the farm, the household, good citizenship, good
morals, etc., are ably discussed. During the first years of the organization
the society planned an annual farmers’ institute. But when the Ohio Agri-
cultural Experiment Station was located here in Wayne county, this organ-
ization was eager and zealous in working for its establishment. Among other
important measures advocated early was the establishment of the rural free
delivery system. Today they are earnestly working for the establishment
of the parcels post system and postal savings banks. The social feature of
the association is counted by its members as a great factor.
The persons who have served as the association’s officers are in part
as follows: Benjamin Wilson, P. S. Ihrig, J. S. McCoy, J. F. Stitt, J. W.
Taggart. Willis Bishop, D. S. Tintsman, W. A. Bruce, M. M. Fowler, D. R.
Firestone, W. E. Jarvis.
The worthy secretaries have been: Mrs. B. F. Wilson, Miss Alma
Smith, Miss Margaret Stitt, Miss Rose Wilson, Mrs. W. A. Bruce, Mrs. F.
I. Heim, Mrs. E. W. Lytle, Mrs. J. S. McCoy, Miss Lucv Stitt, Miss Helen
Davidson.
PLAIN TOWNSHIP FARMERS' CLUB.
This organization is one of two very successful farmers’ societies within
Wayne county. It is styled the Plain Township Agricultural Association
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
and has for its object the improvement of agriculture, that the life of the
husbandman may be made more profitable and less laborious, hence more
pleasant and desirable.
The date of its organization was September, 1890. The charter mem-
bers were as follows: Harvey S. Baker, William M. Gill, Samuel G. Gill
and Curtis W. Rittenhouse. The following have been its presidents : S. G.
Gill, John C. Sidle, C. W. Rittenhouse, W. A. Lehr, G. E. Kean and John
Sparr. The roll of members constitutes more than fifty of the best people
of Plain township.
This society has held three independent institutes, that were distin-
guished for their social, musical and literary excellence. The outside speak-
ers were the best in Ohio, Thorne, Hickman and Selby.
This club affords a means of training for both old and young, in orig-
inal thought, self-command and public address, that is beyond comparison.
They point with much pride to one of its members — J. C. Sidle — as a rising
young figure in the list of public speakers.
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CHAPTER XII.
MILITARY HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY.
The military history of any given county is of great interest to all
patriotic readers of local history. To the county this is what the national
war record is to our republic. The great armies of a country must needs
come from commands made up from the soldiers enlisting in the various
counties of each loyal state in our Union.
But before entering into the details of the soldiery of Wayne county
in the several wars carried on since its settlement by white men — the war of
1812-14 with Great Britain, the war with Mexico, the great Civil war from
1861 to 1865, and the Spamsh-American war of 1898 — it may not be with-
out profit to the reader to become posted about the forts and block houses
erected prior to those wars as a protection against the savage Indian tribes,
mention of which has been made elsewhere in this work.
WAYNE COUNTY BLOCK HOUSES.
From the date of the first settlement in this country until the establish-
ment of peace after the war of 1812, the inhabitants were compelled to
erect block houses and stockades for their immediate protection. This was
done as a precaution against invading foes from the unfriendly Indians.
This was made all the more a necessity after Hull’s defeat and surrender,
as that event much emboldened them in their bloody raids upon the handful
of white settlers. Hence these block houses were found in various sections
of Wayne county.
Where Mrs. B. Pope’s residence stood in 1878 there was once one of
these places of safety erected, and it is said to have been the largest of
any in the county. It was named Fort Stidger, built by Gen. George Stidger,
of Canton, in 1812, and it was a double building, covered by one roof, and
had a separating hall or passage between the two sections. Here the dif-
ferent families of the town and nearby community would assemble when
danger seemed imminent, and remain there during the night.
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Another was built over the Killbuck, about three miles west of Wooster,
on land later owned by Joshua Warner. This building was still standing, in
a good state of preservation, in 1878. Mr. Warner, however, had weather-
boarded its timbers and plastered its interior walls. His family had used
it for a part of their residence for sixty-five years.
Another one of the “forts” stood six miles east of Wooster, near what
was called King's Tavern, and still farther on was another, near the old
Andrew Lucky tavern, south of Fredericksburg but a short distance, and also
on the farm later owned by Thomas Dowty, in Franklin township, similar
defensive structures were provided for the protection of the settlements
thereabouts. A company of soldiers was at one time quartered at the old
Morgan fort. There were still others, of less magnitude and importance,
at different points within Wayne county. These block houses were univer-
sally built on an eminence, by which position the surrounding country might
the more easily be viewed, thus obviating a surprise by the too sudden ap-
proach of the enemy.
In many respects these forts resembled the ordinary cabin. They were
built of logs, laid one over the other and tightly fitted, with little holes
notched between them and called port-holes. Through these openings the
inmates could readily point their guns and fire, at the same time being pro-
tected against the enemy’s shots. With the exception of one door, there
were no other modes of egress or ingress. The structure was built of solid
timbers, firmly and securely fastened inside, and, like the rest of the building,
sufficiently firm to resist any volley of bullets. They were usually two stories
high ; that portion of the building from the ground to the height of about
eight feet was formed of shorter logs than the section above it, which, being
constructed of longer logs, formed a projection over the lower story, which
gave the occupants the chance of shooting down on their assailants, or other-
wise punishing them with axes or pikes, should they attempt to climb and
enter it, or apply a torch.
The note of many a false alarm was sounded, and many a panic-stricken
family rushed for protection to those old wooden walls.
REVOLUTIONARY PENSIONERS IN 184O.
The following is a list of the Revolutionary war pensioners in W ayne
county, Ohio, in 1840: Perry township — Barnett Hagerman, aged eighty
years. Plain township — Augustus Case, aged eighty-seven. Jackson town-
ship— Ezra Tryon, aged eighty. Canaan township — Rufus Freeman, aged
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seventy-eight. Wayne township — John Davidson, aged eighty-four. Chip-
pewa township — Christina Franks, aged seventy-three; Isaac Underwood,
aged seventy-four. Milton township — Benjamin Foster, aged eighty-six;
Benjamin Cotton, aged eighty-three. Greene township — Conrad Metsker,
aged eighty-two. East Union township — Jesse Richardson, aged eighty-
four; Simon Goodspeed, aged seventy-six. Wooster township — Robert Cain,
aged seventy-seven.
PENSIONERS OF THE WAR OF l8l2.
The subjoined is a list of the soldiers of the war of 1812 (war with
Great Britain), as shown to be residents of Wayne county, Ohio, and in force
in 1878, according to the state records at Columbus:
John Achenbach, Moreland; John B. Espy, Wooster; William Johnson,
Wooster; Simon Kenney, Canaan; George Messmore, Apple Creek; Benja-
min Potter, Millbrook; Daniel Rieder, Koch's; Rachel Bugler (widow),
Fredericksburg; John Crummel, Apple Creek; Henry Fike, Smithville; Syl-
vanus Jones, Wooster; John Ludwig, Reedsburg; James McFadden, Cedar
Valley; Thomas Pittenger, Lattsburg; Henry Starner, Wooster; Catherine
First (widow), Apple Creek.
WAYNE COUNTY IN THE MEXICAN WAR.
Trouble had been had between the two republics — the United States
and Mexico — growing out of certain encroachments upon the part of Mexi-
cans, for some time, and finally, on May 12. 1846, war was declared against
our southern neighbors. The bill levying war called for fifty thousand sol-
diers and an appropriation of ten million dollars. War was really officially
declared on the day following, by President James K. Polk. On September
21-23 the battle of Monterey was fought, the first in importance of any in
the conflict. The country manfully responded to the call for volunteers.
It is with a just pride, today, that the sons and daughters of the men
who lived in Warren county can point to the fact that Wayne county did her
share nobly and well. Tuesday, May 26, 1846, the Fourth Brigade, Ninth
Division, Ohio Militia, was hastily mustered at Wooster, for the purpose
of encouraging enlistments. Over thirty on that day signed the muster rolls.
Capt. Peter Burkett, of the Bristol Light Artillery, and David Moore, of the
“Wooster Guards," were present with orders to enlist a company. The
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officers at the head of the list below given were chosen to command the
company, which consisted of eighty-five men, and on Tuesday morning, June
9, 1846, they started for Massillon.
On the morning of their departure General Coulter, on behalf of the
Wooster Cadets, presented to them a handsome flag, making an appropriate
speech, which was responded to by Captain Moore. Before leaving they
were mustered on the northeast corner of the public square, where the mem-
bers of the company were presented with Testaments by the ladies of
Wooster. The company left Massillon the night of June nth, on board two
canal boats, en route for Camp Washington, near Cincinnati. They broke
camp, at the place just mentioned, early July 3d, and the same day left Cin-
cinnati on the “New Era” and “Tuscaloosa” for New Orleans. For some
time they were encamped near the old General Jackson battle ground.
James D. Robison, M. D., of Wooster, was the first surgeon of the regi-
ment, leaving Cincinnati July 3d for Mexico. They served in the Third Ohio
Regiment (there only being three regiments), commanded by Col. Samuel
Curtis, a graduate of West Point and for several years a lawyer of Wooster,
and with George W. McCrook as lieutenant-colonel.
The treaty of peace was ratified at Queretaro May 30, 1848.
The following is a list of the Mexican soldiers who went from Wayne
county, Ohio:
Moore, D. (Captain)
Culbertson, Eli B.
Burkett, P. (first lieutenant)
Chaffe, Amos
McMillen, J. (second lieutenant)
Case, Nathaniel
Botsford, Eli (sergeant-major)
Crawford, James
Armstrong, James
Craven, Robert
Atkinscn, William C.
Crouse, Jacob M.
Brainard, John F.
Coy, Josiah P.
Bower, Wilson
Correston, Alexander
Bair, Jacob
Duck, Daniel
Boyd, William
Divinev, William R.
Bowers, Abraham
Dye. James R.
Beach, Elijah
Emerson, R. D.
Blakely, Albin
Edmonds, A. C.
Baits, David F.
Fleckenger, Jacob
Cooper, P. M.
Freeman, Tames A.
Craig cr John
Fritts. Uriah
Carpenter. Isaac
Fishburn. Howard
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Flannagan, John O.
Fritts, Samuel
Frizinger, George
Geyer, Henry
Galvin, Barney
Goliff, Andrew
Grove, William
Harris, Terry
Hawk, Michael H.
Hess, Jesse
Honn, John
Hemperley, M. H.
Jenkins, George
Joliff, Abraham
Lloyd, John
Lowry, Robert B.
Lowry, James A.
Merrick, John
Moses, William
McCullom, Cyrus J.
Marsh, Joseph
Plumer, J. C.
Powers, Almon H.
Ryan, Jacob
Rambaugh, J. B.
Richard, George
Rice, Frederick
Reighley, Geo., Jr.
Stanley, Wilson M.
Stall, Jacob
Sheldon, Jiles
Strunk, William
Stoffer, William H.
Stanley, Homer
Sample, John
Snyder, Michael
Stavig, Abram
Shoeters, Oswald
Taylor, Thomas
Tweeig, J. E.
vVickey, Daniel
Wood, Charles B.
Wachtel. George
Yergen, John
WAYNE COUNTY AND THE CIVIL WAR.
Wayne county, in common with all Ohio counties, did her part in put-
ting down the rebellion of the people of the Southern states from 1861 to
1865. Patriotism was instilled into the people of this county by reason of
the early settlers having been of the good old Revolutionary stock. It is not
the province of this work to go into the causes of the Civil war, but to give
some account of the men sent forth to subdue the rebellion. The part Wayne
county enacted in this war was prompt and conspicuous, she having fur-
nished from 1861 to 1865 over three thousand two hundred volunteers, not
including a considerable conscript force. The volunteers were distributed
among the various regiments, as follows : One company of the Fourth Regi-
ment; one of the Sixteenth Regiment, in the three months', and five in the
three years’ service; one in the Fortv-first Regiment; five in the One Hun-
dred and Twentieth Regiment; three in the One Hundred and Second Regi-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
ment; one company in the One Hundred and Seventh Regiment; three com-
panies in the One Hundred and Sixty-ninth Regiment of National Guards,
and a detachment of thirty men in the Eighty-fifth Ohio Regiment. These
were all infantry organizations. Wayne county also furnished one company
for the Ninth Ohio Cavalry, small detachments for several artillery com-
panies, besides many fragmentary enlistments in the different infantry organ-
izations.
Fort Sumter was fired upon April 12, 1861, and that demonstration
culminated in the great civil strife that had been fomenting for many years,
really over the question of slavery. Wooster shared in the patriotic excite-
ment of the period and recruiting commenced at once.
The first public meeting of the citizens in Wooster was held at the old
court house, on the evening of April 16th, when a wildly-patriotic crowd
assembled. Hon. William Given was chosen chairman and James McMillen
acted as secretary. Patriotic speeches were made by Judge Given, Eugene
Pardee, William M. Orr and several others. Recruiting had been going- on
previously, however, and fifty men had enlisted through the efforts of James
McMillen, Jacob Shultz and R. B. Spink, the company — the first raised in
Wayne county — being filled up that evening at the mass meeting just men-
tioned.
NAMES OF THE FIRST VOLUNTEERS.
There is always much interest attached to the names of the men who
first, in the true and sublime spirit of loyalty, respond to the call of their
country, hence the list of this pioneer company is here appended :
Arnold, J. W.
Armstrong, George
Anderson. Francis M.
Armstrong, John
Arnold. Levi
Barrett, John F.
Black, James
Bodine, Joseph D.
Black, Anthony A.
Bess, David
Brandt, J. C.
Black, D. Y.
Brinkerhoff, D. O.
Brighton, William
Baumgardner, William H.
Brown, Hubbard
Bucher, W. H.
Carr, J. H.
Cline. William
Carev, George W.
Cassidy, D. S.
Cole, Thomas
Chapman, Alfred
Cline. George
Cutter. Henry
Cook. H. H. *
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Dice, Thomas
Dyarmon, Orlando
Duck, John W.
Dice, J. H.
Dyherman, Nathan
Egbert, Joseph
Everly, Evan
Eberly, William
Eberman, William G.
France, Marion
Foggleson, Corodon
Flack, David
Fitch, John
Francis, George C.
Fishbum, Howard
Gordan, Samuel
Groff, John
Graybill, L.
Gray, Cyrus
Gray, Alexander
Headrich, Henry
Hite, George
Hefflinger, Sylvester
Hoag, Ezra M.
Held, Harmon
Hoke, John
Hansom, William H.
Jeffries, Lemuel
Jahla, John
Johnson, John E.
Kennedy, Robert
Keehn, Frank
Kope, Aaron
Kramer. Benjamin
Kope, James
Lawrence, William
Lewis, Clifford
Lightcap, W. M.
Lehman, L. S.
Long, Charles W.
Lake, Joseph J.
Lyon, John F.
McClure, A. S.
McClure, W. H.
McClarran, J. W.
McMillen, James
Mutscheler, George
McGlennen, William
McElhenie, Robert
Miller, Frank
Mohn, D.
Musser, George
McClure, C. W.
Moffatt, James
McClarren, Thomas
McLaren, H. O.
McKelvy, Edward
Pratt, Joseph D.
Pollinger, David S.
Pritchard, H. C.
Patterson, I. U.
Patterson, George
Reamer, S.
Shultz, Jacob
Spink, R. B.
Sanford, J. B.
Sands, W. W.
Scoby, L. H.
Swearinger, J. S.
Springer, John
Swickey, Henry
Stewart, George
Smedlev, Edwin
Sowers, George
(PS)
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Segner, Robert
Smith, Matt H.
Shreve, Hiempsel
Singer, William
Syser, Harmon
Ulrich, William H.
Urban, William
Vanata, Peter O.
Wain, John
Wilson, Jacob
Warner, T. C.
They immediately organized by electing James McMillen, captain; Jacob
Shultz, first lieutenant, and R. B. Spink, second lieutenant.
THE FOURTH OHIO REGIMENT.
On Monday, April 21, 1861, the first company left Wooster for Colum-
bus. Excitement ran high. Flags floated from nearly all buildings, and
upwards of ten thousand people lined the streets from the court house to
the station, and at the depot speeches were made on behalf of the citizens of
the place by Judge Given, Doctor Firestone, William M. Orr, Eugene Pardee,
Benjamin Eason and others, and on the part of the volunteers by Capt. James
McMillen, A. S. McClure and Levi Graybill. The company started for
Columbus amid the tears and acclamations of the multitude.
Arriving at Columbus, the company was, on April 25th, incorporated
with the Fourth Ohio Regiment of infantry, becoming Company E. The
field officers of the regiment were: Colonel, Lorin Andrews; lieutenant-
colonel, James Cantwell; major, James H. Goodman. The ranks were filled
by two companies from Marion, two from Delaware, two from Mt. Vernon,
two from Kenton, one from Canton and one from Wooster.
April 29th the regiment moved to Camp Dennison, and on May 4th was
mustered into the three-months service by Capt. Gordon Granger, LT. S. A.
A few days later President Lincoln’s call for three-years men was made
public, whereupon the majority of the members of Company E and the regi-
ment re-enlisted for that period, and were mustered in for three years, dating
from June 5, 1861.
The regiment left Camp Dennison June 20, 1861, for West Virginia,
where it participated in the campaign against Rich Mountain, under Gen.
George B. McClellan. It was then ordered to New Creek, Maryland. Au-
gust 9th it marched to Camp Pendleton, on the summit of the Alleghany
mountains, where they encamped and fortified.
In the middle of September Lieutenant-Colonel Cantwell, with six com-
panies of the regiment, among which was Company E, made an attack on the
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Confederates at Romney, Virginia, driving them from the town in great
disorder and with severe loss. They were, however, reinforced in a few
hours, and on the 4th the Union forces were compelled, in considerable hurry,
to evacuate the place and retreat to Fort Pendleton. John F. Barrett, of
Wooster, was severely wounded in this engagement, being the first Wayne
county soldier shot in the Civil war; William Cline, of Wooster, was also
wounded in the same engagement.
October 26th, the same year, the Fourth Regiment, with other troops
under command of General Kelley, again advanced on Romney, took the
town after a short engagement, with a loss of fourteen killed and wounded,
the Confederates suffering a number of killed and all their baggage, two
pieces of artillery and a number of prisoners captured.
Romney was evacuated on the 10th of January, and the regiment trans-
ferred to Patterson’s creek, on the north branch of the Potomac, and thence
in February to Paw-Paw tunnel on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, there,
under General Lander, participating in the capture of Bloomery Gap, with
a large number of Confederates and stores. Lander shortly after dying
at Paw-Paw, Gen. James Shields took command of the division and marched
on Martinsburg, which the Confederates evacuated, after destroying a large
amount of railroad and other property. March nth Shields’ command moved
on Winchester, and on the 23d and 24th engaged Stonewall Jackson in his
retreat up the Shenandoah valley. May 24th the regiment marched, via
Luray, Front Royal, Chester Gap, Warrenton, Catlett’s Station, to join Mc-
Dowell’s troops at Fredericksburg. On the 23d the regiment, with others
of Shields’ division, was ordered back to the valley, via Manassas Junction.
It reached Front Royal on the 30th, drove the enemy from the place, released
a regiment of Union soldiers they had taken, captured a large quantity of
ammunition and supplies and a number of prisoners. On June 3d it moved
toward Luray, and on the 7th a forced march was made by the brigade to
Port Republic, reaching there in time to check the enemy and cover the re-
treat of a portion of Shields’ division, under General Carroll.
After marching and counter-marching in the valley, the regiment was,
on the 4th, ordered to Alexandria, where it embarked to join McClellan’s
army, then supposed to be operating against Richmond. It arrived on the
last day of the Seven Days’ fight, and was immediately under fire, losing sev-
eral men. On the evacuation of the Peninsula by the national forces, August
16, 1862, the regiment returned to Alexandria. Capt. James McMillen was
accidentally drowned at Alexandria during the embarkation of the regiment
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
for the Peninsula. Its next important service was at the battle of Fredericks-
burg, December 13, 1862, where the regiment, as well as Company E, suf-
fered heavily. Lieut. William Brighton of this company was killed in this
engagement. May 3d the regiment participated in the fearful battle of Chan-
cellorsville, again suffering heavy loss. Its next great battle was Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, on the 1st, 2d and 3d of July, 1863, where its losses were also
very heavy. On the 4th it was one of the three regiments that drove the
enemy from Cemetery Hill, after they had driven a part of the Eleventh
Corps from the field and gained possession of our two batteries. Generals
Hancock, Howard, Gibbon and other prominent generals witnessed this
charge and gave it the highest praise.
Shortly after this terrible battle the Fourth Regiment was ordered to
New York city to assist in quelling a spirit of insubordination which had
manifested itself there. The Fourth was soon ordered to Alexandria and went
into winter quarters at Stevensburg on the 1st of December, 1863. It then
participated in General Grant’s campaigns and battles. Towards the close
of the war, the ranks thinned by the bullets of the enemy and by disease,
the company was mustered out of service, having traveled in its campaigns
an aggregate of four thousand two hundred and fifty miles, and at all times
maintained the highest reputation for discipline, soldierly behavior and good
conduct on the battlefield. Hence it will be observed that the pioneer com-
pany of men who went forth as green, undrilled volunteers from Wayne
county, proved in every instance worthy the name and fame of American
soldiery.
SIXTEENTH REGIMENT OHIO INFANTRY.
As there are still living in Wayne county many descendants of the men
who wore the loyal blue as members of the gallant Sixteenth Regiment, a
short description of the various campaigns of this command will be given.
The second company from Wooster was organized the latter part of April,
1861. Recruiting for it commenced on the 20th, and by the 25th the com-
pany was full, when the following officers were elected : Captain, George W.
Bailey; first lieutenant, Aquila Wiley: second lieutenant, Cushman Cun-
ningham. It joined the Sixteenth Regiment at Columbus, Ohio, April 28th.
There it drilled and remained in camp at Camp Jackson several \veeks, then
went to West Virginia, and took part in the battle of Phillippi, one of the
first engagements of the war. The Wooster company, under command of
Captain Wiley (Captain Bailey having been promoted to major), was sta-
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tioned at Grafton, West Virginia, and at Oakland, Maryland, during the resi-
due of three months’ service. On the expiration of its term of enlistment the
company was mustered out and returned home.
The Sixteenth Ohio Regiment, for three years' service, was organized
at Camp Tiffin, near Wooster, October 2, 1861. The regimental camp was
located in Quimby Grove, a short distance northwest of the present site of
Wooster University. Five companies for this regiment were recruited in
Wayne county, commanded respectively by Eli W. Botsford, Hamilton Riche-
son, Samuel Smith, George U. Harn and A. S. McClure. The field officers
were: Colonel, John F. DeCourcey; lieutenant-colonel, George W. Bailey;
major, Philip Keshner.
The regiment moved to Camp Dennison November 27, 1861, and re-
mained there until December 19th, when it was ordered to Lexington, Ken-
tucky. From that point it proceeded to join General Thomas' forces, then
operating against Zollicoffer’s command in southern Kentucky. After toil-
some marches through mud and rain the regiment arrived at Somerset just
in time to miss the battle of Mill Springs. The regiment remained near Som-
erset throughout January, 1862, when it \vas directed to Cumberland Ford,
reaching there February 12th. Troops were assembling at the ford, under the
command of Gen. George W. Morgan, to dislodge the Confederate forces
occupying Cumberland Gap, a few miles distant. In March and April several
reconnoisances were made in the vicinity of the gap, during which sharp
skirmishings took place with the enemy. The Sixteenth lost several men,
killed and wounded, during these engagements. In June Morgan’s forces,
composed of Ohio. Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee troops, succeeded in
crossing the Cumberland mountains by Powell’s Gap, thus effecting a lodge-
ment in rear of Cumberland Gap and necessitating its evacuation by the Con-
federates, who retreated to Knoxville, Tennessee, and the Union forces occu-
pied the abandoned stronghold without further resistance.
At Tazewell, Tennessee, the regiment encountered Kirby Smith's army,
in motion to invade Kentucky. A sharp engagement ensued in which the
Sixteenth Regiment was overwhelmed by numbers and forced to retreat to
the Gap. with a severe loss in killed, wounded and captured. At Cumberland
Gap the situation was now indeed serious. They were surrounded on all sides
and their supplies cut off. General Morgan determined to abandon the Gap
and retreat to the Ohio river. After a toilsome march of sixteen days
through a rough mountain region, the command reached the Ohio at Greens-
burg, Kentucky, October 3, 1862.
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The regiment was next ordered to Charleston, West Virginia, and from
thence to Memphis, Tennessee, to join General Sherman's command, then
being organized for the capture of Vicksburg. In December Sherman's forces
moved down the Mississippi in transports, arriving at the mouth of the Yazoo
on Christmas day. The troops proceeded up the Yazoo several miles, when
they were disembarked and prepared to assault Vicksburg on the Chickasaw
Bluff side. On December 28th the enemy was driven out of his line of rifle-
pits in front of the bluffs, and on the 29th of December Morgan's division was
ordered to assault them. The position of the Confederates was impregnable
and the assault was very disastrous. The Sixteenth lost very heavily. Capt.
G. U. Harn was killed; Captain Van Dorn wounded and captured; Captain
Ross wounded ; Captain McClure wounded and captured ; Lieut. P. M. Smith
wounded and captured; Lieutenant Heckert wounded and captured; Lieu-
tenant-Colonel Kershner wounded and captured ; Lieutenant Voorhes wounded
and captured ; Captain Mills and Cunningham and Lieutenant Buchanan cap-
tured. The regiment lost in this engagement three hundred and eleven offi-
cers and men killed, wounded and captured.
The next service of this regiment was at Arkansas Post, in which as-
sault it lost several men. It then returned to Young’s Point, on the Missis-
sippi river, and from there it moved to Milliken's Bend, where it encamped
until the 6th of April, 1863. The regiment then participated in Grant's
campaign against Vicksburg, in the battle of Champion Hills, Thompson's
Hill, Black River Bridge, and the assault on the encroachments of Vicksburg
in May, 1863, losing seventy men in each of these engagements.
After the capture of Vicksburg, July 4, 1863, the regiment joined the
forces of General Sherman in his expedition against Jackson, Mississippi.
In the assault at this place Captain Richeson was wounded and several of the
Wayne county men killed. Returning to Vicksburg, the regiment was sent
into camp, but was soon ordered to New Orleans to join General Washburn's
expedition to Texas. The regiment disembarked at DeCrows Point, and
moved from thence to Indianola, and on to New7 Orleans April 12, 1864.
From New7 Orleans it w as ordered to Alexandria, on the Red river, to rein-
force Banks' command, w7hich was then retreating from before the forces of
Dick Taylor. On arriving at Alexandria the Sixteenth wras immediately
placed at the front and participated in several engagements. Returning to
Alexandria, it was detached to help construct a dam in Red river to facilitate
the escape of the iron-clad fleet. From here Banks retreated to Morganza
Bend, on the Mississippi, the Sixteenth forming a part of the rear guard in
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:
this disorderly retreat. On reaching Morganza Bend the regiment went into
camp, from where it was ordered to Columbus, Ohio, for muster out, return-
ing there, and was discharged October 31, 1864.
The Sixteenth Regiment was one of the best disciplined regiments in
the Union army. Its colonel, John F. DeCourcy, was a professional soldier,
having served many years in the British army. The command was noted
for its fine, manly, military bearing.
FORTY-FIRST REGIMENT OHIO INFANTRY.
Company C, of the Forty-First Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, was
recruited in Wayne county in August and September, 1861. Its officers were :
Aquila Wiley, captain ; F. E. Pancoast, first lieutenant, and Rufus B. Hardy,
second lieutenant. In the early part of September the company was ordered
to Cleveland, where it was mustered into the Forty-first Regiment on the 19th
of September. The field officers of this regiment were: Colonel, William B.
Hazen; lieutenant-colonel, John J. Wizeman; major, George S. Mygatt. On
November 6th the regiment was ordered to Camp Dennison, and from thence
to Gallipolis, and from that point to Louisville, where it became a part of the
Army of the Ohio, under command of General Buell. During the winter the
regiment was encamped at Camp Wickliffe. In April, 1862, it took part in
the great battle of Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing). It lost in the first day’s
fight, one hundred and forty-one officers and men killed and wounded. Cap-
tain Wiley was severely wounded in this famous battle; also Lieutenant Pan-
coast. who subsequently died from the effects of his wounds.
After much hard campaigning in Alabama and Tennessee during the
summer of 1862, the Forty-first Regiment joined the retreat of Buell to
Louisville, and shortly after reaching there engaged in the battle of Murfrees-
boro, where it lost one hundred and twelve men killed and wounded.
In January, 1863, the regiment moved to Readyville, about twelve miles
from Murfreesboro, where it remained until the 24th of June. During the
months of July and August the Forty-First Regiment was kept in motion and
in Septembei, 1863, participated in the battle of Chickamauga, in which en-
gagement it greatly distinguished itself. The next important battle in which
it participated was Mission Ridge, fought November 23d and 25th. Here
one hundred and fifteen men of the Forty-first fell. Colonel Wiley lost a leg
while gallantly leading the charge. General Thomas, on the field, compli-
mented this regiment highly for its splendid conduct. After this battle they
marched to Knoxville, and there re-enlisted as veterans: and when the men
had enjoyed the veteran furlough, the regiment, with one hundred recruits.
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rejoined its division in eastern Tennessee, being placed in a battalion with the
First Ohio Regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel Kimberly commanding.
The regiment then participated in nearly all of the battles of Sherman in
his campaign against Atlanta — Rocky Face Ridge, Dallas, Piney Top Moun-
tain, Peach Tree Creek, etc. In this campaign the regiment lost one hundred
and fifty-eight men, the regiment dwindling down to a mere skeleton of only
ninety-nine men.
On the occupation of Atlanta by the Union forces the Forty-first Regi-
ment was sent in pursuit of Hood, and participated in Thomas’ victory over
that Confederate general in front of Nashville. In June, 1865, the regiment
was ordered to Texas, where it was stationed near San Antonio until Novem-
ber, and then ordered mustered out. It reached Columbus, Ohio, about the
middle of the month, and was finally discharged on the 26th of November,
1865, after four years and one month’s service.
Company C, of this regiment, was a splendid company of men, of high
reputation in all respects, and perhaps saw more hard service than any other
company raised in Wayne county.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTIETH REGIMENT.
There were four full companies and a part of the fifth company of this
splendid regiment raised in Wooster and Wayne county. Joseph H. Down-
ing, George P. Emrich, Benjamin Eason and William G. Myers were elected
captains of their respective companies. The field officers were : Colonel.
Daniel French; lieutenant-colonel, Marcus M. Spiegel; major, John W. Beek-
man. The five Wayne county companies were recruited in August. 1862,
and rendezvoused at Camp Mansfield August 29th. October 17th it was mus-
tered into service, and on the 25th of the month moved to Covington, Ken-
tucky. from which point it departed, November 24th. for Memphis, Tennessee,
reaching there December 7th. Here the regiment was assigned to Colonel
Sheldon’s brigade, of Morgan's division, being a part of the Army of the
Tennessee, under command of Gen. W. T. Sherman, and destined to operate
against Vicksburg.
December 20th the regiment moved on transports down the Mississippi
river, thence up the Yazoo, where it disembarked at Jonnson's Landing and
participated in the assault against Vicksburg. After the repulse of the na-
tional forces from Vicksburg, the regiment embarked on transports and ac-
companied the expedition against Arkansas Post, which resulted successfully.
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From Arkansas Post the regiment returned to Young’s Point, and went
into camp. Here it was decimated by disease, measles, typhus and malarial
fever working havoc in its ranks. At one time over half the regiment was
reported on sick list. The officers became discouraged and resigned in large
numbers, which contributed to the despondency of the private soldiers.
In April, the regiment took part in General Grant's campaign against
Vicksburg, engaging in the battles of Champion Hill, Thompson's Hill, the
Black River, and in the charges on Vicksburg, May 22, 1863. It behaved
gallantly in all of these actions. After the final fall of Vicksburg the regi-
ment joined Sherman's army in his famous expedition against Jackson, hold-
ing the right of the column in its advance. In the operation against Jack-
son, Lieutenant Totten was mortally wounded, and Colonel Spiegel and Lieu-
tenant Spear were severely wounded.
The regiment returned to Vicksburg July 20, 1863, and on the 8th of
August embarked for New Orleans to join Banks’ expedition in western
Louisiana. It took part in the campaign in the valley of the Teche, and was
then sent to Plaquemine, a small town on the Mississippi river, where it re-
mained until March, 1864, being then ordered to Baton Rouge.
May 1 st the regiment was ordered to join Banks, then operating in the
direction of Shreveport. The regiment embarked on the transport “City
Belle,” for Alexandria, and when passing up Red river it was ambuscaded at
Snaggy Point by five thousand rebel soldiers concealed behind the levee. A
murderous artillery and infantry fire was opened on the crowded boat, and
the deck was soon slippery with blood. After a short but ineffectual struggle,
against overwhelming odds, the regiment was compelled to display the white
flag. During the conflict the “City Belle” drifted to the opposite side of the
river, where quite a number of the One Hundred and Twentieth Regiment
escaped. Colonel Spiegel, Surgeon Stanton, Assistant Surgeon Gill, Captains
J. R. Rummell. Miller, Fraunfelder and Jones, Lieutenants Applegate. Baer
and Roach and two hundred men fell into the hands of the rebels, besides the
bodies of the killed. Colonel Spiegel was mortally wounded and died the
next day. He was one of the noblest and the “bravest of the brave.” The
prisoners were at once marched off to Camp Ford, near Tyler, Texas, where
they were confined until the close of the war.
After this disaster the remnant of the regiment retreated with Banks’
forces to Morganza, Louisiana, where it was consolidated with the One Hun-
dred and Fourteenth Ohio Regiment. This ended the career of the gallant
regiment as a regimental organization. It was a good behaved regiment, but
was overwhelmed with a series of disasters.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
THE ONE HUNDRED AND SECOND REGIMENT.
This regiment was organized under the call of President Lincoln for
three hundred thousand more men for three-year service. Three companies
were enlisted in Wayne county, respectively by Captains John W. Stout,
Jonas D. Elliott and James E. Robinson. The field officers of the regiment
were: Colonel, William Given; lieutenant-colonel, Abraham Baker; major,
George H. Toping; William H. McMonigal was adjutant. Recruiting com-
menced in July, 1862, and in August the Wayne county companies moved to
Camp Mansfield. September 4th the regiment left for Kentucky, crossing
the Ohio river at Cincinnati on the morning of the 5th. It was mustered into
service the next day at Covington. September 22d it was transported in
boats to Louisville, and was present at the battle of Perryville, but not en-
gaged. From there it was sent to Crab Orchard, and from thence to Bowling
Green, Kentucky, arriving on the 30th of October. December 19th the regi-
ment moved to Russellville, and from there to Clarksville, Tennessee, reaching
that point on Christmas night, where it remained nine months.
October 30, 1863, the regiment went into winter quarters at Nashville.
It was transferred to Tullahoma, Tennessee, where it was occupied guarding
a railroad from Normandy to Dochera. June 6th the regiment marched
across the Cumberland mountains to Alabama, the left wing of the regiment,
under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Elliott, being stationed at Dodson-
ville. The regiment was now engaged in defending the line of the Tennessee
river from Stevenson to the foot of Seven Mile Island, a distance of fifty
miles. As security against attack, twelve block houses were erected along
the line. In defense of the line the regiment performed invaluable service
and had frequent encounters with the enemy. Having been relieved from the
duty, the regiment was engaged next in patrolling the Tennessee and Ala-
bama railroad from Decatur.
Colonel Given, commandant of the post, September 23d was directed to
send a detachment of four hundred men to reinforce Fort Athens. The de-
tachment was composed of soldiers from the Eighteenth Michigan and the
One Hundred and Second Ohio, under command of Lieutenant-Colonel
Elliott, of the latter regiment. The command encountered the Confederate
General Forest near Athens, where it was surrounded and overwhelmed by
superior forces and forced to surrender. Lieutenant-Colonel Elliott received
a mortal wound in this action. The officers were taken to Selma and the
men to Cahaba, Alabama. The men were finally paroled and placed on
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board the “Sultana,” at Vicksburg. During the passage up the river the boat
was blown up, April 28, 1865, and, as nearly as can be ascertained, eighty-one
of the regiment lost their lives by the disaster.
The regiment was in Decatur at the time of the siege by Hood, and was
highly complimented for its behavior. June 30, 1865, the regiment was
mustered out of service at Nashville, Tennessee. It then proceeded to Colum-
bus, Ohio, and was discharged July 8, 1865. This regiment was made up of
excellent men, and displayed great bravery and skill whenever it was called
upon to engage the enemy.
THE ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTH REGIMENT.
Capt. Gustave Buecking’s company of the One Hundred and Seventh
Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry was raised chiefly in Wooster, from among
the patriotic Germans of the city. Recruiting for it commenced in the lat-
ter part of July, 1862, and the company was soon filled to its maximum. In
August it was ordered to Cleveland, where it was incorporated with the One
Hundred and Seventh Regiment, whose field officers were: Colonel, Sera-
phim Meyer; lieutenant-colonel, Charles Mueller; major, George Arnold.
Soon after its organization, this regiment was ordered to join the Army of
the Potomac. Its first important battle was at Chancellorsville. The regi-
ment belonged to Howard's Eleventh Corps, which was so terribly handled
by Stonewall Jackson, and lost two hundred and twenty men killed and
wounded. Its next general engagement was at famous Gettysburg, where
the regiment was almost annihilated, losing over four hundred men in killed,
wounded and prisoners, out of five hundred and fifty that entered the battle.
August 1, 1863, the regiment sailed to Folly Island, South Carolina, and
performed picket duty there until January, 1864. After the resignation of
Col. Seraphim Meyer the discipline of the regiment steadily improved. From
Folly Island the regiment was taken to Jacksonville, Florida, where it had
several skirmishes with the Rebels. It returned to South Carolina on the
23d of March, 1865, and met a detachment of the enemy, defeating him, cap-
turing three pieces of artillery, six horses and fifteen prisoners.
The regiment did provost duty in Charleston, South Carolina, during the
balance of its service until July 10, 1865, when it was mustered out and sent
home to Cleveland, Ohio, where it was discharged. This command was made
up largely of Germans. It was a fine body of men, its members displaying
their earnest patriotism and heroic valor on many occasions.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
NINTH OHIO CAVALRY REGIMENT.
Wayne county furnished nearly a hundred men for cavalry service under
Capt. William Henderson. These were enlisted in December, 1863, and
January, 1864. They served with Sherman on his celebrated “March to the
Sea,” being under General Kilpatrick. The Wayne county company was with
that illustrious general when his camp was raided by Humphrey's cavalry.
They were at the battle of Averysboro and Bentonville, North Carolina. At
the close of the war they were mustered out and returned home.
MISCELLANEOUS DETACHMENTS FROM WAYNE COUNTY.
A detachment of cavalry was recruited in Wayne county in October,
1861, by Lieut. Benjamin Lake, for McLaughlin's squadron, joining the
squadron at Mansfield the latter part of the month. . In November it left for
eastern Kentucky, where it engaged in campaigning for nearly two years,
taking part in the battles of Middle Creek. Pikeville and Round Gap. In
August, 1863, the squadron left eastern Kentucky and joined the Twenty-
third Army Corps, under General Hartsuff, marching to Knoxville, where it
remained until January, 1864, then re-enlisting as veterans. It filled up its
ranks and then joined General Stoneman’s command in the raid on Macon.
In this raid it suffered heavy losses. It next operated on Sherman’s flank in
the movement against Atlanta, and afterwards was placed under Kilpatrick’s
command, going with Sherman on his “March to the Sea” ; thence from
Savannah with the national forces through South and North Carolina. It
was mustered out of service at Camp Chase, Ohio, November 17, 1865.
Another detachment from this county was made up of about thirty men
enlisted under Lieut. Joseph C. Plummer, for the three-months service, in
the Eighty-Fifth Ohio Regiment, which guarded the prisoners at Camp Chase,
near Columbus, Ohio.
Three companies of the Ohio National Guards, under Captains Henry C.
Shirk, William K. Boone and Abraham Gift, were raised in Wrayne county,
for one hundred days’ service, and joined the One Hundred and Sixty-ninth
Regiment of National Guards, of which J. H. Carr was lieutenant-colonel.
This regiment was organized at Cleveland, May 19. 1864, and was imme-
diately ordered to Washington, where it participated in the defeat of Early’s
army, and did garrison duty in Fort Ethan Allen. So proficient did the regi-
ment become in tactics, that General DuRussy declared it was equal to any
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three-year regiment in his command. During its four months' sendee the
regiment suffered severely from sickness, nearly two hundred men dying or
becoming permanently disabled by disease. It was mustered out September
4, 1864.
IN MEMORIAM.
Wayne county has reason to be proud of her record in the great civil
conflict from 1861 to 1866. Her soldiers participated in every great battle,
and her dead lie buried in every Southern state — once slave states, but which
now, through the blood and sacrifice of the loyal men of the country, have
become free.
THE FIRST SOLDIER WOUNDED FROM WAYNE COUNTY.
As time passes along, there is among the generation just succeeding to
that great struggle more and more interest in the casualties of the great Civil
war. It is with this in view that there is here given the following biography
of John F. Barrett, still living in Wooster, and who was the first victim to
receive Confederate lead in his body from among the brave men who went
forth from this county; he is still a daily sufferer, though more than forty
years have passed since the wound was received. He has the unalloyed re-
spect and sympathy of all within Wayne county who carry a drop of loyal
blood in their veins. The following was penned concerning this soldier in
1878:
“John F. Barrett was born March 6, 1836, in Wayne county, Ohio
He volunteered in the Fourth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, April 16, 1861 — four
days after Fort Sumter was fired upon — in Company E, Capt. James Mc-
Millen’s company, and was among the first men to put his name down in
Wavne county (Jacob Shultz being the first). He went with the regiment
to Camp Dennison, followed it to West Virginia, and, along with the boys,
smelled the breath of battle at Rich Mountain.
“The way in which Mr. Barrett was wounded was as follows: The
Eighth Ohio Volunteer Infantry had been attacked at New Creek, whereupon
they sent to Fort Pendleton for reinforcements. The Fourth Regiment pro-
ceeded to their relief, marching thirty-five miles to New Creek, assaulting Rom-
ney at 1 :30 P. M., fighting the enemy that night, and capturing the town the
next morning. Company E of the regiment having been sent to the east end
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
of the town to protect a gun about to be charged upon by the enemy, between
the hours of one and two o'clock P. M., Mr. Barrett was wounded, receiving
a desperate bullet shot from a sharpshooter. For two years he had to walk
on crutches. Surgical science has exerted itself in vain to extricate the bul-
let, and Mr. Barrett is doomed to carry the enemy's lead in his body to his
grave.
“Mr. Barrett was married September 18, 1863, to Laura Nimons. of
Wooster, by Rev. Jesse Durbin, of the Methodist Episcopal church, of which
he has been a member since 1856. We make mention of the wounding of
Mr. Barrett, not because he was braver than his fellow-soldiers, or more
patriotic than his comrades in arms, but because he was the first soldier from
Wayne county shot in the war of the Rebellion. He was a gallant soldier
and it is a record of which he may well be proud. He is an honorable busi-
ness man and a worthy, upright citizen."
It may be added that today, September 23, 1909, he still walks with two
crutches, has been in the hospital many weeks, and has no hope of recovery —
the ball cannot be removed.
SOLDIERS OF THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR.
Wayne county, true to the spirit of her patriotism, furnished her full
quota of men to put down the war with Spain, growing out of the oppression
that country had for centuries exerted over the island of Cuba, but which was
brought to an issue with the United States government when, in the spring
of 1898, the United States gunboat “Maine" was sunk by the explosion of tor-
pedoes in Havana harbor by the Spaniards, as the trial finally proved. War
was at once levied by this government, President William McKinley ordering
an army raised, which was accomplished within a short time.
About the close of the struggle, which was of short duration, a roster of
the Ohio volunteers for this war was published, and while it was full of de-
fects, it is the only information at hand, giving a list of the officers and men
who went from this county, and is here extracted from. There may be a few
omissions, but in the main it will be found correct, as it was authorized by
the adjutant general of Ohio. There were ten regiments sent from Ohio to
this war in the infantry service and one of cavalry; also a regiment of light
artillery. The regiment represented from Wayne county and Wooster,
chiefly, was the Eighth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and the greater portion of
the Wooster men participated in the war as members of Company D.
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OFFICERS.
The officers of the Eighth Regiment were: Curtis V. Hard, colonel;
Charles W. F. Dick, lieutenant-colonel; Edward Vollrath, Frederick C. Bryan
and Charles C. Weybrecht, majors; Alexander W. Maynes, adjutant; Emmer
C. Farquhar, surgeon; George H. Wuchter and Allen V. Smith, assistant sur-
geons; Herman L. Kuhns, quartermaster; Charles F. Schaber, George M.
Wright and Andrew Weybrecht, battalion adjutants; Isaac N. Kieffer, who
died June 23, 1898, James O. Campbell, vice Chaplain Kieffer, chaplains.
The officers of Company D were: Captain, Frank C. Gerlach; first lieu-
tenant, William E. Barnard; second lieutenant, Gustave W. Unger. The
non-commissioned officers were as follows: W. A. Conrad, artificer; David
H. Drushal, musician; Charles A. Heater, musician; Lloyd A. Naftzger, wag-
oner; Harrv P. Eaby, sergeant; George S. Limb, sergeant; Louis E. Gasche,
sergeant ; Franklin B. Horn, sergeant ; Horace W. Miller, sergeant ; Webster
D. Horn, corporal; Charles R. Scott, corporal; George M. Swartz, corporal;
Harry D. Woolman, corporal.
The privates credited from Wooster in the adjutant's report were as fol-
lows, and only represent the original muster roll, and none of the later re-
cruits are named :
Barnes, John R.
Barnhart, Charles W.
Baughman, William H.
Blake, George.
Boyd, William H.
Braustetter, Harry P.
Brown, George W.
Brown, Thomas P.
Burg, George.
Cameron, Nathaniel C.
Christine, Louis W.
Clark, Jerome E.
Clay, Alvin B.
Conrad, Edward D.
Critchfield, Lyman, Jr.
Cumberland, Charles E.
Cumberland, LaVerne C.
Curry, Will R.
Dice, Arch H.
Frazier, Charles W.
Funk, Sterling R.
Glenn, Joseph S.
Gravath, Ouintin W.
Greist, James E.
Grossenbach, Cary W.
Hughes, William H.
Johnson, Merton R.
Jolliff, Harvey F.
Kinkier, Harry.
Langell, Clement.
Laufzenheiser, Irvin.
Laufzenheiser, Perrine.
Leopold. Frederick J.
Lerch, William G.
Mahaney, Edward.
Maize, Percy M.
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McKinney, Charles H.
McKinney, Frederick S.
Miller, Harry C.
Oltmanns, Antoin.
Reider, Edmond S.
Schurch, Fred A.
Schuck, William.
Stevens, Thomas R.
Stotsbery, William A.
Unger, Charles E.
Webb, Charles B.
Winebrenner, Calvin A.
Yoder, Ephraim.
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CHAPTER XIII.
THE CHURCHES OF WAYNE COUNTY.
While the pioneers of Wayne county, Ohio, came to the wild woods to
carve out homes for themselves and their families, and were men of the world
in a sense, who followed the chase and loved amusement, there was also in
them a sentiment of true respect for all sacred things and not a few were
devout Christians when they settled this county. This element at a very
early day sought to establish the teachings of the Man of Galilee, and were
much interested in securing missionaries, being liberal in their support of the
founding arid maintaining of the church of their choice, though scant was
their means at first.
BAPTIST CHURCH.
The earliest church formed in Wayne county was of the Baptist denom-
ination, and at Wooster. It is known as Bethany church and has a history
as old as the city itself. Although the society was not formed until 1812.
some of its charter members were among the first settlers of the place. From
the sermon delivered by the pastor. Rev. J. B. T. Patterson, in 1876. we
draw the following facts concerning the history of Bethany church of
Wooster :
In 1812 a block house, for the protection of the people against the In-
dians, who had allied themselves with the British in the war then just begun,
was built on the premises of Col. John Sloan*. In this block house and in the
same year, the Baptist church was formed and has kept its organization alive
and active ever since — a period of ninety-seven years.
The first Baptists who settled in Wooster included David and Lydia
Kimpton and Philip B. Griffith, who effected their settlement here in 1810.
The following year came Ezekial Jones and family, and others of the Baptist
faith settled in this township about the same time. To this faithful band of
believers Elder Kimpton preached here in the wilderness, but he did not suc-
ceed in organizing a church. It was July 25, 1812. when a meeting was held
(ifi)
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“to take into consideration the propriety of organizing a church in this new
country/’ The following named persons were present: David and Lydia
Kimpton, Ezekial and Hannah Jones, Oliver Jones, William Robison, John
Robison, Ann Robison, Catherine Kirkendall, Thomas G. Jones and Philip B.
Griffith. The record adds that “several of the brethren prayed.” It was voted
that the organization take place on the first Lord’s day in August, and that El-
der T. G. Jones should write the constitution and present it at the next meet-
ing, on Friday before the first Lord's day in August. July 31, 1812, this consti-
tution was adopted and also provided that a business meeting be held on a Sat-
urday in each month, alternately in Wooster and at Brother Kimpton’s settle-
ment. Mr. Kimpton was appointed moderator of the church.
On August 2d, being the Lord’s day, the brethren convened in the block
house, and whilst “a body of men, armed with guns, stood guard about the
building, to give warning and protect them in case of an attack from the
Indians,” the church constitution and the covenant, known as the “Philadel-
phia Confession of Faith,” was formally and solemnly ratified, and the
church constituted.
Up to April 17, 1813, the records are kept up in due form, and then a
break in the minutes occurs, which is thus accounted for:
“There seems to be a vacuum in the minutes, which was occasioned by
the war of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain, as many were
afraid of the Indians and their allies, by reason of which some fled and the
church became luke-warm, by reason of the war, as that was almost the uni-
versal topic, and the event of it was of much importance to this country.”
Meetings were at first held in private houses, but in 1814 a frame build-
ing was erected in the rear of the lot on which the Reformed church was after-
wards erected. It was situated within convenient distance of the block house,
which overlooked it. The worshipers sometimes carried their guns with them
to the meeting house, though it does not appear that the settlement was ever
disturbed by the Indians.
This house being the only church in the settlement, it was generally
used bv visiting ministers of other denominations, and at times also as a
school house. One entry in the records of this church states that previous to
1819 there was “cash paid for meeting house $125.00.” This did not include
the frame work, weatherboarding, roofing nor chimney, but mentions the
flooring, and among other items, hair and hickory brooms. This building
was later sold and removed to the east side of Buckeye street, turned end for
end. the doors and windows altered, and converted into the Wooster City
Tannery, where it still stood and was thus labeled as late as 1878.
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Brother Kimpton was moderator, or overseer, but never a pastor. The
first pastor was Elder Thomas G. Jones. The church, however, had in
its membership several preachers, who, in connection with the pastor, not
only preached to the church, but also engaged in missionary work, making
tours to the surrounding settlements.
This church was very careful in the reception of its members, holding
firmly to the New Testament principle that the churches of Jesus Christ are
to be composed only of converted persons. July 1, 1815, is found the fol-
lowing in the minutes: “Motion by Brother Thomas G. Jones, that the mem-
bers absent from church meeting should not enjoy the privileges of the next
communion, except they render satisfactory reasons for such absence, to the
church or deacons.”
The annual growth in membership during the earlier years of this church
is not known, as the books of record are silent on the questions of member-
ship and baptisms. The first list of members, as found appended to the min-
utes, and dated November 4, 1815, shows that there were one hundred and
fifteen, who had been added by baptism and letter, to the original eleven or
possibly twelve which made up the charter membership. After the first three
years the growth of the society was slow but solid. In 1816 this church had
a call and responded in sending their minister and other brethren to consti-
tute the Baptists at Mohican into a church, and to ordain their minister,
Alpheus French. This was the first Mohican church. The land on which
the first church was built was donated by William Robison. October 4,
1817, the church resolved to have a weekly prayer meeting.
Another account says: “In 1819 all the Baptist churches in Pennsyl-
vania west of the Allegheny river, and all the churches in Ohio, east of
Wooster and as far north as the lake, were included in the Beaver associa-
tion.” This association was organized in 1809, by twenty-five delegates,
representing ten churches. Five of these delegates were ministers. In 1819
the Mohican association was formed from the Beaver association. The
Wooster church assisted in forming that body, and remained a member of
it until 1840. In 1818 the Beaver association held its meeting in the Wooster
church.
In 1827, a schism was produced in the body by the introduction of the
sentiments of Alexander Campbell, at which time some eighteen members
seceded and went over to the “Disciples.” It was a number of years before
the church at Wooster recovered from this shock.
March 5, 1831, it was resolved to build a new meeting house and the
minutes show that the congregation had great trouble in raising sufficient
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funds with which to complete the new church, it not being completed until
1839. The house was floored and plastered through the efforts of the ladies
of the church. Sister Cynthia Van Ostern promised to pay forty dollars
(a large sum those days) and while she knew not where the money was to
come from, she pledged it, and by industry and economy, she was enabled
to raise the money and redeem her pledge. In that building there was a
gallery extending around the sides and end of the building, but later this was
removed and in 1865 the house was all remodeled.
Wooster association was formed in 1837 an(l was composed of Massil-
lon, East Union, Warren, Wooster, Salt Creek, Sugar Creek, Sandyville, or
Magnolia, Mohican, Canal Dover, Green township and Clark township
churches, eleven in all, with each an ordained minister. There were four
hundred and fifty-three communicants.
Elder Jones served the Wooster church for twenty-seven years and in
1839-40 was succeeded by Rev. Charles Morton.
In December, 1845, the subject of instrumental music was brought up,
but was indefinitely postponed. In October, 1846, a resolution “to continue
the choir” was passed. In January, 1847, a special meeting in regard to in-
strumental music was held, and the following resolution adopted : “Resolved,
that instrumental music be prohibited from coming into this church hence-
forth.” In December of that year a motion was passed, that “members at
evening service be allowed to conduct the singing as suited to themselves.”
In 1851 the membership was two hundred and forty-eight.
In March, 1853, a committee was appointed to build a vestry and bap-
tistry.
In March, 1855. a number of persons were dismissed by letter to form
a church at Millbrook.
In August, 1875, ^e Wooster association met at the Wooster church.
In 1876 the lecture room was completed, the same having been erected
through a legacy bestowed by Mary B. Larwill. The baptistry was also re-
modeled, deepened and a heater connected with it, the funds for this coming
from Mrs. Joseph H. Larwill.
The present membership is one hundred and eighty-eight. A comfort-
able parsonage of eight rooms was built in 1896. Nearly two thousand dol-
lars was expended during the pastorate of Rev. H. D. Allen in repairing and
decorating the church and parsonage. The church is now in a flourishing
condition and looks forward to the celebration of its centennial in 1912. The
following have served as pastors since the organization :
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1810, David Kimpton (overseer); 1812, Thomas G. Jones; 1819,
Thomas Hand; 1832, Frederick Freeman; 1839, Charles Morton; 1845, S.
B. Page; 1850, E. T. Brown; 1856, T. J. Penny; 1861, John Bolton; 1862,
P. M. Weddell; 1868, no pastor; 1869, G. M. Preston; 1871, no pastor;
1873, Alex. McFarlane; 1874, Hugh A. Marshall; 1875, J. B. T. Patterson;
1879, Alexander McFarlane; 1881, S. M. Cramblett; 1883, W. F. Slocum;
1888, Albert H. Jessup; 1893, E. A. Read; 1897, C. V. Northrop; 1898, E.
Chesney, Ph. D. ; 1902, J. M. Lockhart; 1905, H. D. Allen, Th. D.
BAPTIST CHURCH OF MILLBROOK.
The Baptist church of Millbrook was formed by the aid of members of
this denomination who lived at Wooster. At first, when they organized, they
built what was styled the Dunbar church. In 1854 they erected a church of
their own, the same being over the line in Clinton township. The early Bap-
tists here were Elijah Pocock, Mrs. Irvine Keys, Mrs. Williams, John Reider
and wife and Elizabeth Knox. This church has wrought great good in Plain
township since the long-ago pioneer times in Wayne county. The member-
ship is small now and it is believed the property will be sold and a church
formed at Orrville. Union services are continued at this point yet, however.
SECOND BAPTIST CHURCH OF WOOSTER COLORED.
This church was organized in January, 1892, with thirteen members,
by Rev. James Cheetman, Dr. Chestney and Judge Swartz. The organiza-
tion was effected at the house of R. L. Morrison. The services at first were
held in Engine House No. 5, which was leased by the society. A church
building was at once put under construction and dedicated in the autumn of
the year 1892, by Revs. Ford and Cheetman. It is a frame structure, lo-
cated on East Vine street, and is about forty by eighty feet. Its cost was
one thousand eight hundred dollars. The present membership is about thirty-
two. The pastors who have been called to preside here are : Revs. Cheet-
man, D. S. Omer, Joseph Speers and the present pastor, H. B. Brown.
The church at Moscow, though small, still exists as a society and is now
supplied from abroad.
THE REFORMED CHURCH OF WOOSTER.
A number of Reformed families, German and Pennsylvanian, had early
settled in and about Wooster. The Rev. Henry Sonnedecker, residing in
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Washington, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1819 made a missionary tour
through the counties of Wayne, Jefferson, Tuscarawas and Richland, in Ohio,
and, according to appointment, preached in a brick school house at Wooster
on the first day of August. This was the first sermon ever heard in this
locality from a minister of the Reformed church. This first service awak-
ened a desire and holy enthusiasm. The visiting clergyman was urged to effect
an organization and consented to serve it. Though not immediately ac-
cording to his wishes, his sympathetic heart was touched. He made a second
visit November 21st of the same year, when he again preached, and effected
an organization in conjunction with the Lutherans, and accepted a call to be-
come their pastor. November 21, 1819. is therefore the date of the birth of
this church. January 14, 1820, Rev. Sonnedecker removed his family to
Wooster, and on the 23rd of the month preached his introductory sermon in
the old school house. For seven years he had the distinction of ministering
alike to the Reformed and Lutheran people, when the Lutherans called to
their pulpit Rev. G. H. Weygandt.
The first communion of the Reformed church at Wooster was held
July 16, 1820, when twenty-five persons communed, of whom ten had been
received by confirmation the previous day.
Services continued to be held in the old school house, or in private
houses, until the fall of 1820, when a one-story frame house was built con-
jointly by the Reformed and Lutherans. This house bore the significant
name of “Die Friedens Kirche.” Rev. Sonnedecker here continued his
services for eleven years, with great acceptance, closing his pastorate April
3, 1831. During this time he baptized two hundred and forty-six children and
received into the church fellowship fifty members. The records tell us, “He
was beloved by his congregation, and the day on which he preached his fare-
well sermon was a solemn and memorable one.”
The strippling church, after the resignation of Rev. Sonnedecker, was
left without a pastor for nearly two years. He was followed by Rev. Charles
Zwisler, who remained seven years, beginning early in 1833 and closing the
latter part of 1839. It was during his pastorate that steps were taken to-
ward the erection of a new church. The lot (the same as the German Luth-
eran church now stands on) was purchased for one hundred and fifty -five
dollars and ten cents and contained two and a half acres. September 28.
1833. the graveyard was laid out. December 17, 1833, the union organiza-
tion was incorporated. The brick building, forty-six bv fifty feet with a
gallery on three sides, was begun during the summer of 1836, the comer-
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stone being laid in September. The walls of the building were left unroofed
during the winter of 1836-7. Thus exposed, a considerable portion of the
west wall was blown down by a severe storm. The church was finally com-
pleted in June, 1838, at a total cost of four thousand one hundred and thirty-
one dollars. The church was dedicated during the annual meeting of the
Ohio synod, on Saturday, June 16, 1838, Rev. Abraham Keller preaching
on that occasion.
Rev. A. L. Begman succeeded Rev. Zwisler as pastor, continuing about
three years, closing his labors in June, 1843. The Union Sunday school was
organized in February, 1843, and Isaac H. Reiter was elected superintendent.
The school opened properly April 2, 1843, with a hundred scholars. The
next pastor was Rev. J. P. Manshenschmidt, who remained but a year, leav-
ing September 29, 1844.
The fifth pastor was Rev. Kaemmerer (afterward D. D.), who began
his pastorate under rather adverse circumstances, but soon secured the con-
fidence of the entire congregation. May 16, 1853, the Lutherans and Re-
formed amicably separated and on that date the Reformed were organized
into a separate congregation. Up to this time the church had been served
only in German. To supply the growing need of English, in August, 1853,
Rev. Hiram Shawl was called to officiate in English, whilst Rev. Kaemmerer
still continued to preach in German. Rev. Shawl remained but one year, but
Rev. Kaemmerer continued nineteen years, closing his pastorate in April,
1864.
Rev. Joshua H. Derr came next, continuing until 1869. Rev. Kaem-
merer, who had returned from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, having regained his
health, found the church scattered with a positive disposition toward parti-
tion and sale of the church property, which sale was finally effected at pub-
lic auction in the early part of 1869. The Reformed people realized from
said sale only one thousand one hundred and thirty-seven dollars. After
three years, Father Kaemmerer could not longer wait, but commenced to
gather up his old people and, with courage and abiding faith, called upon
and personally invited his old hearers to attend services and hear him preach
again. Services were held in the court house. After three powerful ser-
mons he succeeded in reorganizing the church and a lot was bought and in
a few days two thousand four hundred dollars was raised to pay for the
same, its location being on the corner of Buckeye and North streets, where
the present church stands.
After leaving the court house, for a time the congregation worshiped
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in France’s Hall. This lasted until a billiard hall and gambling club secured
quarters in the third story of the building. This drove the congregation into
Zimmerman’s block, in a room on the third floor, but in the very nature of
the case this could only remain as temporary quarters. May 21, 1871, after
service, it was, with a sole exception, determined by vote to begin the erection
of a building. It was decided to build in the Gothic style a building forty-
four by seventy feet, one story high. The corner stone was laid August 12,
1871, Rev. J. F. H. Deichman preaching the sermon in German and Rev. J.
Voght, of Delaware, Ohio, in English. Services were begun in the Presby-
terian church, the remainder of the services being held on the open church
lot. The children were marched in a body to the church and lot in order that
they might all see the laying of the cornerstone. The work of building was
pushed during the summer and fall of 1871, so that all was in readiness for
dedication by the end of the year. At the dedication, December 31, 1871,
Father P. Herbruck preached in German and A. F. Zartman, a student,
preached in English. The church was then in debt six thousand dollars and
on one day three thousand dollars was secured. The statement made at date
of dedication was as follows: Entire cost of building, $12,221 ; lot, $2,400;
total cost of property, $14,621 ; balance yet unpaid, $1,926. The membership
was then but one hundred and thirty. Mr. Zartman was called to become
pastor, and he preached in English, while Father Kaemmerer preached in
German. Mr. Zartman was ordained May 5. 1872. He remained about
two years and died soon afterwards of consumption.
The next pastor was Rev. Henry Hilbish, beginning September 1, 1874.
and he served until 1876. Next came Rev. Milton H. Groh. It was at this
juncture that difficulty arose over the introduction of English in the church.
Times had changed and something had to be done. The result was that,
after much trouble, the German element, properly speaking, gave up their
rights and also their property rights and the English-speaking people carried
on the church finances and work alone. The German element, now without
a worshiping home, under the leadership of Father Kaemmerer as pastor,
secured the old vacated Lutheran church, which stood on the corner of North
Market street, and there worshiped in their own manner in the German
tongue until the autumn of 1888. when, by reason of the declining years of the
devout pastor, the church was allowed to go down.
In 1878 the English Reformed church called Rev. T. J. Bacher to become
pastor. He was instrumental in lifting a large debt before he left in 1881.
The next pastor was Rev. John S. Stoner, who died in 1882. Rev. R. C.
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Zartman began his pastorate in April, 1883, coming direct from the Theo-
logical Seminary at Toledo, Ohio. Improvements, including a slate roof on
the church, were made and before he left the large church debt had all been
wiped out. He resigned in 1888 and was succeeded by Rev. E. M. Beck in
1889.
In August, 1896, the church had to have a thorough remodeling. Again
in 1904 material changes were made, and the two-story Sunday school room
was added, making a total expense at that date of about eight thousand six
hundred dollars. A parsonage was built in 1892, costing about one thousand
six hundred dollars.
The membership in September, 1909, was two hundred and seventy.
The pastors since 1878 (the others having already been given) are as fol-
lows: Rev. T. J. Bacher, Rev. John S. Stoner, Rev. R. C. Zartman, Rev.
E. M. Beck, Rev. S. E. Neikirk, Rev. F. Cromer.
REFORMED CHURCH OF REEDSBURG.
The Reformed church of Reedsburg was founded by Adam Stump, a
pioneer minister of the west, who labored here in 1840 and organized the
congregation. Rev. J. Schlosser was the second pastor, and he was followed
by Rev. Jesse Hines and he by Rev. J. J. Excel, under whose ministrations the
church edifice was constructed. In 1878 the church was credited with being
in a prosperous condition. At present, 1909, the church has a membership
of many faithful Christians. Rev. D. Martz is the present pastor. He also
has charge of the churches at or near Blachleyville and one in Chester town-
ship.
REFORMED CHURCH OF MARSHALLVILLE.
The Reformed church at Marshallville was organized in 1835 an(l a joint
church building erected with the Lutheran denomination in 1836. This was
in the country, but in 1874 the Reformed people built a church of their own
in the village at a cost of seven thousand dollars. Rev. F. Strassner was the
first pastor, and others were faithful pastors at an early time, including Rev.
Sonnedecker, Monosmith and Swissler. The present membership is of good
number. The present pastor is Rev. C. F. Brouse.
REFORMED CHURCH OF ORRVILLE.
This church was organized and incorporated January 20, 1869. Serv-
ices from the first have been conducted in English and each other Sabbath in
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German. The present membership is large and the congregation occupy a
church buifding erected in 1908, the first one having been erected in 1869.
The last one built is a handsome brick costing twenty-six thousand dollars.
The charter members were J. Wert, J. Frey, M. Gruger, P. Krick, A.
Wirth, J. Speicher, J. Humi, G. Yaekley, Benj. Evman, Z. K. Long, F. Piens
and C. Albright.
REFORMED CHURCH OF CANAAN TOWNSHIP.
This church at an early day was associated with the Lutheran denomina-
tion, but in 1870, after their separation, they erected their own edifice, which
was completed in 1872.
REFORMED CHURCH IN MILTON TOWNSHIP.
The Reformed church was founded in Milton township in 1851 and was
situated in the south part of the township. Rev. Vermley was among the
pioneer pastors.
REFORMED CHURCH IN EAST UNION TOWNSHIP.
Wooster and neighboring churches of this faith were included in one
charge until 1864, with Rev. J. H. Derr as pastor. In that year he began
services in Appleereek in Gashat’s Hall, but in 1867 laid the cornerstone for a
church and it was dedicated in 1870. It was of the Gothic type of church
architecture, and at the time it was considered one of the best churches in
Wayne county. The first regular pastor was Rev. Philip Becker. In 1878
the church had a membership of ninety members. At present it has the
largest membership of any of this denomination in Wayne county. Rev.
Flohr is pastor.
ZION's EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH OF WOOSTER.
Zion's Evangelical English Lutheran church, of Wooster, Ohio, was
organized September 13, 1840, bv Rev. Solomon Ritz. although English
Lutheran services were held occasionally for some years prior to this time
by Rev. E. Greenwald. of New Philadelphia. Rev. George Leiter, of Mansfield,
Rev. Francis Ruth, of Gabon. This church was organized with the follow-
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ing sixteen members: George Reiner, John A. Lawrence, Henry D. Miller,
Israel Windel, Abraham Fox, Conrad Giler. Benjamin Lehman. Mary Ann
Fox, Sarah Lawrence. Catharine Miller, Frederick Hoke, Fanny Lehman,
Mary Johnson and Isaac Notestine.
The succession of ministers was as follows : Rev. Solomon Ritz from
1840 to 1843; Rev. George Leiter from 1843 to ^44 : Rev. J. Sloan from
1845 to 1^85 1 ; Rev. W. A. G. Emerson from 1851 to 1852: Rev. Dr. J. B.
Baltzly from 1853 to 1868: Rev. Ira C. Billman from 1868 to 1871 ; Rev. Dr.
Wiles from 1871 to 1884; Rev. Dr. G. M. Heindel from 1884 to 1891 ; Rev.
Dr. W. W. Crilev from 1891 to 1898; Rev. G. C. Smith from 1899 to 1905;
Rev. Frank Heilman from 1905 to date.
The present membership of this church is six hundred. The edifice in
which this congregation worships was erected about 1884. and the property
is now valued at forty-five thousand dollars. The former building stood on
Market street near North street. This church enters heartily into all union
Christian services, fellowshiping all orthodox denominations.
EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHRIST CHURCH.
The first of this church’s history began when Rev. D. Henkel, a mission-
ary, preached the doctrines of the denomination in Wooster as early as
1815. Rev. John Stauck succeeded in 1816 and for the first time administered
the Lord’s Supper, when Mrs. McIntyre, Mrs. Anspach and Mrs. Ihrig were
received into the church bv rite of confirmation. In 1820 the Reformed de-
nomination united with this body and erected a joint house of worship, a
small frame structure, which stood north of school building No. 4. Union
churches in early times were very common, not because they agreed in religions
faith, but because of nationality, there being many Germans here who desired
to speak in their mother tongue, and then in union services the expenses were
much lighter than to support two or more building enterprises. This state
of worship continued for seven years, when, in 1827, Rev. G. H. Wevgandt
came from Washington county, Pennsylvania, and became pastor, and a sec-
ond joint church was built. Wevgandt remained pastor until 1840, preach-
ing only in German. Subsequently the purely German element felt slighted
at the introduction of English speaking, and withdrew and started a church
on Buckeye street. This, however, only lasted two years, when they re-
turned and brought with them a pipe organ with four stops. In May. 1833.
a distinctive Lutheran constitution was adopted. It was in 1867 when the
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Reformed and Lutherans finally separated. The society adopted a second
constitution in 1885, when the word Lutheran was dropped and simply the
word Evangelical was made use of in the name of the denomination. The
same church as was jointly used by the Reformed and Lutherans up to 1867
is still in use, with a few modifications and the adding of a one thousand
five hundred dollar organ in June, 1907. The upper story of the building
is used as a Sunday school room. This old pioneer church building stands
on the corner of Henry and Grant streets, and is still in excellent repair; it
is a substantial brick building, two stories high. The present church mem-
bership is about one hundred and fifty.
The pastors that have served since 1887 are Revs. J. F. Fetzer, J. D.
Dieterle, 1888; A. Mallick, 1890; C. Schaeffer, 1893; G. L. Heck, 1897; F.
H. Krafft, 1899; F. H. Graeper, 1903; H. J. Brodt, coming in 1907, is the
present pastor.
LUTHERANS IN PLAIN TOWNSHIP.
The Lutherans in Plain township first held services in 1836, at the resi-
dences of Jacob Smyser, Sr., and M. Stam; also at an old log school house
east of the village. Mr. Smyser was the first Lutheran to settle in Plain
township.
SALEM LUTHERAN CHURCH OF WAYNE TOWNSHIP.
As early as 1827 Rev. G. H. Weygandt preached in this vicinity, and
with him as pastor the Lutherans, with a few German Reformed settlers,
laid the cornerstone of a church in 1828, on joint ground procured for church
and graveyard purposes, from land owned by John Lehman. This union
building was dedicated in 1830. The Lutherans erected a new building in
1871.
CANAAN LUTHERAN CHURCHES.
The Canaan or Kopp’s meeting house was built in 1830 by the German
Reformed and Lutheran denomination, the Lutheran minister being Rev. A.
Kuhn. Among the earliest members were the Wevgandts, H. H. Hoffman
and the Schuhs. In 1870 these congregations dissolved.
THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH.
The Evangelical Lutheran church of Canaan township was built in
1870 and eight years later had a membership of seventy-one.
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At the present time there are no Evangelical churches in Wayne county
outside of the one at Wooster.
LUTHERAN CHURCH, PLAIN TOWNSHIP.
In 1834 the Reformed and Lutheran churches united in building this
church, in Plain township. A permanent organization was effected Novem-
ber 5, 1843, and ten years later a new building was erected by the Lutherans.
In 1878 the membership had reached sixty-two.
st. Paul's reformed Lutheran church.
This congregation originally attended the Evangelical Lutheran church.
In the summer of 1842 a new church was erected, or rather commenced, but
not finished until 1846. In March, 1845, Rev. Robert Koehler became their
minister and served one year. The congregation separated into two — the
German and French elements, the congregations retaining their common prop-
erty, creed and name. This church is located in Paint Creek township. Mt.
Eaton being its seat.
ENGLISH LUTHERAN MISSION CHURCH.
This church was organized at Orrville, January 6, 1877, with ten mem-
bers, and was incorporated January 31, 1876, with the following trustees:
Jesse Good, A. W. Bomberger, Otho Miller, G. G. Wear and A. McGriffin.
March 28th A. C. Miller, M. D., of Cleveland, and J. H. Stoll, M. D., and
wife, in April, deeded grounds to the trustees, thus securing to the church the
entire block lying on the southeast comer of Vine street, for a consideration
of one thousand nine hundred dollars. In July, 1876, they began the erection
of a church, the cornerstone of which was laid in September. By October
the same year the building was ready for occupancy. At present the con-
gregation worships in the same church edifice, a good brick structure, and the
membership of the church is not large, but in a prosperous spiritual condition.
WEST LEBANON EVANGELICAL CHURCH.
The first church here was erected in 1831, prior to which there was no
organization there of this denomination. This building was built bv the
Reformed and Lutheran societies.
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Jacob's Lutheran church, franklin township.
The church of this denomination in Franklin township was built in
1844, on lands donated by Jacob Herman, and was named Jacob’s church, by
Jacob Snyder. Rev. Kline was the first pastor. Prior to this the Lutheran
families of the vicinity had to go to Wooster to worship.
TRINITY ENGLISH LUTHERAN CHURCH.
The church of this congregation in Franklin township was erected in
1861, on lands donated by David Lawrence. Individual members furnished
the material, cut the timber and hauled the logs. This church organization
was the outgrowth of a dispute that arose between the members of the old
Jacob's church, as to whether there should be German or English preaching.
The church was organized with eighteen members.
EVANGELICAL CHURCHES.
The original members of the Evangelical church of Plain township were:
F. Felger, John Radebaugh, M. Rittenhouse, Philip Kettering and John Welt-
mer. They erected a house of worship in 1856 and another was provided in
1876. It is now known as the Grand View church.
EVANGELICAL ASSOCIATION.
The first church of this denomination was built in 1848, and was dedi-
cated by Bishop Seibert. It had a membership of forty. The new church
"ras erected in 1874.
CHURCH OF CHRIST.
What was styled the Church of Christ was organized in Wooster July
26, 1835. The organizers were William F. Pool, Peter Willis, Frederick
Kauke and wife, John Miller and wife, Jacob Watchel and wife, Samuel
Zimmerman and Mary his wife, George K. Zimmerman, Griffith L. Jones,
Elizabeth Scott, Eleanor Jones, Mary McCurdy and a few others. This
organization left no record, but it is known that they kept alive their meetings
and ‘‘broke the loaf.’ In twelve years it had grown to a society of one
hundred members. For several years the church had no meeting house.
Part of the time it occupied the old court house, in which place it had been
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originally organized. Sometimes it assembled in the school building in the
south part of town. At other dates it met at some of the members' houses.
For a time it met in a cooper shop, but finally in 1847 a church building was
completed by them on the corner of Walnut and South streets. The first
regular pastor was J. H. Jones, who began his labors in 1845 and continued
until 1857; after him came the following: Errett, Jones, White, Walker,
Bauserman. Moffett, Lowe and Carlton. Among the noted evangelists who
frequented the place and worked zealously was Alexander Campbell. Up to
1878 there had been connected at one time or another seven hundred different
persons, but many removed, died, changed to other churches and were ex-
cluded, thus lowering its membership greatly. The present church was
erected in 1889. The present pastor, Rev. James K. Shellenberger, came
September 7. 1905.
Other Christian churches of this county are at Blachleyville, Orrville
and Fredericksburg.
SHREVE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.
The Disciple or Christian church at Shreve has always been a strong,
healthy society and has from an early date been the means of doing much
active church work. This church was first established a mile and a half
to the north of the present village, on the farm owned by James Moore. Rev.
John Chester, Rev. Lewis Comar, Rev. Jewell and Rev. Mitchell were among
the pioneer preachers. In 1856 the society moved to Shreve and erected a
small frame building in which to worship. This served until 1902, when
the present magnificent brick edifice was constructed at a cost of ten thousand
dollars. It overlooks the village from the hill north of the business portion.
Since moving to Shreve, the pastors have been in the following order :
Revs. Harrison Jones, Isaiah Jones (his brother). J. W. Lowe. Fred
Hoffman, Uriah Hoffman, M. L. Moody, D. C. Henselman. O. Q. Oviatt, W.
H. Woodard. S. F. Simpson, L. W. Spade, D. W. McConnell, M. L. Decker.
The present membership of this church is four hundred, while that of
the Sabbath School is four hundred and sixty-two, the same having been
presided over for over forty years by one man. R. D. Wells.
THE DISCIPLE CHURCH OF PLAIN TOWNSHIP.
This church was formed at Blachleyville and a church building erected
in 1866. Hugh Funk and family. Peter Baker and his father s family, Cas-
per Swart and others were among the earliest of this denomination in this
part of Wayne county. Rev. Harrison Jones was the first preacher.
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FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF WOOSTER.
It is to be regretted that the very earliest date of Presbyterian organiza-
tion in Wooster, and of course in Wayne county, is a very uncertain con-
jecture, as the earliest records, if indeed there were such, have long since
passed beyond the mind of the present day Presbyterians of the county. It
may be remarked, however, that in nearly all of the first settlements of Mary-
land, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio there was an element of
Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism, and wherever it located it found a place to
worship God. While not largely represented in Wayne county, it still had an
opportunity to sow the good seed which in later decades grew and flourished.
They had in them the ring of the true metal and blue was their color.
The earliest record of this church was found many years ago in a book
dingy and yellow with age, quaint in style and wonderfully humorous in its
many suggestions. It bears the date of October 30, 1821, and bears this in-
scription : “Presented to the First Presbyterian Church of Wooster by Rea-
sin Beall.” This book indicates that there had been a constitution prior to
that date. It also mentions the fact that on that date they had met to devise
means to relieve their minister from wordly cares and avocations, and second,
to provide a place for holding public worship. There are other circumstances
that would tend to place the organization of the church as early as 1815. In
a little house on West Liberty street, some ten or a dozen Presbyterians as-
sembled before 1815, and doubtless in that house, about 1815, the birth of the
church, now so strong and well known, had its origin.
Ben Douglas, in his history of Wayne county in 1878, declared that
Alexander McBride told John McClellan that this church was organized with
fifteen members in 1815, by Rev. William Mathews, by the order of the
presbytery of Richmond, at which time Mr. McBride and Walter Buchanan
were chosen ruling elders. For the first five or six years the record is silent ;
what prosperous or adverse winds blew over this congregation, none can now
tell.
The records of the Mansfield presbytery show that Rev. Thomas Barr
accepted, April 4, 1820. the call of this congregation for one-half of his
time, and that on May 24. 1820, he was installed pastor over the united
charge of Wooster and Applecreek. It was Reverend Barr who was chair-
man of the meeting held in the Baptist church. October 30. 1821, when the
constitution, as now known of record, was adopted. John Christmas, of
Wooster, donated the society a lot for building purposes about that date.
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This lot was situated on West Liberty street, the same being duly accepted
at a meeting at the house of Reasin Beall, November 2, 1821, and the same
was ordered recorded in the records of Wayne county. It now appears in
book B, page 407-8-9. The comfnittee on building went forth armed with
a subscription paper which allowed the same to be made “in money, grain or
such produce as is usually taken in stores, in two equal installment, viz :
The first to be paid March 1st and the balance in December following/’ The
process was a slow one indeed, but finally the first contract was let for fifty
thousand bricks, for which thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents were to be paid
in cash, and seventy-five dollars in equal proportions of wheat, at sixty-two
cents a bushel, delivered at Mr. Stibbs’ and Mr. Plank’s mills. This was one-
half the contract price for the brick and the remainder was to be paid in June
on terms equal to that of the first installment.
To give the reader of today a glimpse of the manner of building and
also of doing business in those days, it will here be pertinent to give some of
the incidents and items : “Four outside doors to be made of good, sound and
well-seasoned pine or white walnut boards similar to the front door in Reasin
Beall’s dwelling house.” The thirteen windows, washboards, posts and gal-
lery floors, lathing and plastering stairs to the gallery, and its front, the pul-
pit, the seats and the railings, were each and all as quaintly and as minutely
specified. No record is left of the date of the first meeting in this new house
of worship, but it is believed that it was in November, 1825, possibly the
24th of that month. The seats were sold to the highest bidder on the 20th
of that month, to raise funds with which to complete the church. Three
months’ time was given to bidders for a part of the price, the remainder in
nine months, one-half in money and the other part in wheat, rye and corn
dt the market price. The following curious receipt shows that they worshiped
in this building in 1826:
“I have received from Reasin Beall and others, twelve dollars in full, for
making fires, lighting candles and sweeping the meeting house for the year
1827, commencing November 30, 1826, and ending December 31, 1827.
“(Signed) Jacob Mason.”
In such an age as this one can scarcely realize the way in which churches
were built and how scarce money was. This accounts for the bartering in
all kinds of truck and merchandise, even to whisky, which then went as cur-
rent for debts as did corn, wheat and stock. The subscription list. sa;d still
to be retained by the congregation as a rare and curious relic of “antic: t d\ s
in Wooster,” will here follow:
( 17)
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WAYNE COUNTY. OHIO.
“$508.75, $34 in work, $20 in bricks (2000), $16.00 in wheat. 200
bushels of wheat, $105 in sawed stuff, $42 in flooring, $47 in hauling, 258
bushels of corn, $10 in digging stumps and foundation, 175 lights of sash,
$10 in poplar boards, 114 bushels of rye, ten joist at ten cents per foot. $12
in leather, $75 in cloth, five yards in linen, five yards in tow linen, twenty
pounds of flax, $9.37 cents in coarse shoes, $20 in silver-work, $10 in tea-
spoons, five dollars in tailoring, $6.00 in blacksniithing, $2.00- in cabinet
work, $13 50 in hats, $8.00 in saddlery, $30 in nails, one spinning wheel, and
forty-two gallons of whisky.”
The clerk neglected to give names of the church members who gave
these contributions, even to those who donated whisky. The “whole subscrip-
tion amounted to $1,568.58. The amount obtained from sale of seats was
$1,136.15. Delinquent subscriptions, $184.40.
In September, 1829, Reverend Barr, having had a long, hard pull at
church building, resigned as pastor.
After several unsuccessful attempts, the union existing between Woos-
ter and Applecreek charges was abrogated September 13, 1831, after which
time Wooster had her own pastor all the time. In January, 1840. steps were
taken toward the providing of a more commodious church. But deep water
had yet to be crossed by the congregation, and delays were thwarting the plans
for building — they had foes within and foes without. Rev. Joseph Chambers
was called to the pastorate in 1850, but only remained until August, dying
in the following month. Again the matter of building was broached and sub-
scriptions taken freely, the same to apply on a church to be erected on West
Liberty street, the old site. But through the work mostly of the ladies of
the church the project was changed and the new plan was to build on the site
of the present church. A building committee composed of five men — J. P.
Coulter, Janies Jacobs. Ephraim Quinby, Isaac Johnson and Rev. J. X. Shep-
herd— was set to work again with renewed vigor. The cost of this structure
was between five and six thousand dollars. The first meeting was held in the
new church January 2. 1854, when E. Quinby. Jr., was elected trustee, and
he later served as treasurer a number of years. Steps were taken to provide
the church with a suitable parsonage at a meeting held January 11, 1859.
The lot on which the building was erected was purchased of Mr. Quinby for
seven hundred and fifty dollars.
I11 1870 the Westminster church was organized, in connection with the
Wooster University, which was a child of the original Presbyterian church
of Wooster.
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In 1874 the church was remodeled, wings added thereto and in all there
was an outlay of about fourteen thousand dollars.
The record of membership is as follows: Organized in 1815 with fifteen
members ; when Reverend Barr was made pastor the membership had reached
thirty-three; when he left it had one hundred and seven; from 1846 to 1853
the aggregate membership was three hundred and seventy. In 1878 the mem-
bership had reached, after counting out all removals, deaths and other
changes, a net of four hundred and sixteen. According to the records of the
church in 1909 the church was made up of five hundred and twenty members.
The present house of worship is the same as in 1854, aside from the improve-
ments made from time to time. The present pastor is Rev. David Ayrton
Heron.
The pastors have included the following, though not possibly all, in the
order here named: Rev. Matthews, 1815 on for a number of years; Thomas
Barr, many years; William Cox, one year; William Wiley, one year; George
W. Warner, from 1832 to 1836; William McCandish, 1839 to 1849; Joseph
H. Chambers, 1850 to August of same year, when he died; J. N. Shepherd,
1850 to 1851 ; James H. Baird, to 1854: J. B. Stewart, to 1857; R. Colmery,
to i860; S. W. Miller, called 1868 to 1874; T. A. McCurdy, D. D. ; Oscar A.
Hills, D. D. ; Hamilton W. Lowery, D. D. ; Scott F. Hershey, LL.D., Ph. D. ;
David Ayrton Heron, came from Indianapolis in July, 1908.
WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
This church is in Wooster and is the outgrowth of the Wooster Univer-
sity and the child of the First Presbyterian church of the city. Its present
membership is three hundred and fifty-five. The Westminster congregation
worshiped in the chapel of the university from its organization in 1874 until
December, 1901, when the University building was destroyed by fire. In
the spring of 1902 the present Memorial chapel of the university was dedi-
cated, built at a cost of forty thousand dollars, the money having been secured
through the liberality of a number of friends. In style of architecture it
follows strictly the English gothic of the thirteenth century. The building
is a light buff Ohio sandstone and will accommodate about eleven hundred peo-
ple. The five-thousand-dollar organ was constructed bv the Austin Company
of Hartford, Connecticut.
The list of pastors who have served this congregation is as follows:
Revs. T. K. Davis, D. D. : A. A. E. Taylor. D. D. ; S. F. Scovel, D. D. ; Ed-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
ward W. Work; S. Hale Young; J. J. Lucas, D. D. ; O. A. Hills, D. D. ;
Chalmers Martin, D. D. ; John Leonard Tait.
MARSHALLVILLE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
This church was organized January 19. 1843, by Rev. A. Hanna, with
a membership of fifty-seven. Rev. John Andrews was the first pastor, in
1843-
SUGARCREEK PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
This church was organized in 1816, but had held services as early as
1814. The charter membership was twenty-three. Rev. James Adams, who
formed the society, remained from 1814 to 1823. The first meeting house
was of logs, and it was situated two miles west of Dalton ; the second was
on the site where the third church was erected in 1853-54.
ORVILLE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
Prior to the formation of the church at this point occasional services
were held. Rev. Archibald Hanna preached the first sermon in the interests
of this sect in 1852, in an old school house. No further record of any services
is had until those of July 9, 1854, by Rev. John E. Carson, held in the Union
church. Here they henceforth worshiped until the basement of their own
church was fit for occupancy. During the ministry of Reverend Semple, the
church was organized July 25, 1865. The original membership consisted of
the following: Mr. and Mrs. Gailey, Mr. and Mrs. Reaser, Mr. and Mrs.
Kirk Johnston, James A. Taggart, Margaret F. Crites, Rebecca Wilson,
Lydia Wilson, Mary L. Wilson, Mary J. Ewing, Delilah McFarland, Sarah A.
Orr, Rebecca M. Storrs, Catherine Schriber and Sarah J. Taggart.
Rev. Semple’s labors ceased September 16. 1866, and he was followed
by Rev. M. L. Anderson. Up to 1878 there had been connected with this
church two hundred and fifty-seven persons. The number in 1909 was shown
to be two hundred and sixty-three. The same brick church erected in 1871
is still doing good service. The present pastor is Rev. Joseph V. Findley.
PRESBYTERIANS IN CANAAN TOWNSHIP.
The first church organized in Canaan township was by the Presbyterian
people at Jackson, May 25, 1827, with sixteen members. Nathan Hall and
Thomas Hays were chosen ruling elders. Tn 1838 the congregation called
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its first regular pastor, Rev. Thomas Barr, who served them nearly forty
years. Their second house of worship was erected in 1837, the third in
1854, and at present the congregation is flourishing with a church membership
of sixty-two.
WAYNE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
This Presbyterian church was organized August 22, 1833, with thirteen
members, by Rev. William Cox. The original members were as follows:
James and Sarah McCoy, Robert and Elizabeth Eakin, Moses and Sarah
Foltz, Margaret Beer, Abigail Johnston, Nancy Orr, John Rose, Mary Rose,
Mary Lawrence and Maria McClarran. Its membership is now about fifty.
PRESBYTERIANISM IN GREENE TOWNSHIP.
The Presbyterian was the fourth church to be formed in Greene town-
ship, the date being in 1830.
APPLECREEK PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
This is one of the pioneer churches in Wayne county. It dates its or-
ganization from 1815 or 1816 and it was brought about by Reverends Hughes
and James Adams. The membership was at first thirty persons, four of
whom were James Bingham, Daniel Kirkpatrick, Jonathan Peppered and
Moses Dunham. These were ruling elders. The first church was built in
1817, the congregation being occasionally supplied until 1819, when Rev.
Joseph Harper became the stated supply. In 1820 Rev. Thomas Barr set-
tled as pastor at Wooster and Applecreek. In 1825 a larger house was built
and in 1830 Rev. William Cox became pastor. In 1837 he was followed by
Rev. Richard Graham and he in turn by Rev. Joseph Wylie. During his
pastorate a third church building was erected and there was a great revival
in the church. In 1850 came Rev. J. E. Carson. In i860 Rev. Andrew Vir-
tue came and remained almost nine years. In 1868 came Rev. W. Engleson,
who in 1875 was followed by Rev. S. C. Ferris. Then came Rev. J. C.
Truesdale in 1878 and remained seven years. The next pastor was Rev. L.
T. Laverty in 1885. during whose pastorate the present church was erected.
In 1891 came Rev. A. W. Verner, who served until August 2, 1896, then
came Rev. G. S. Hachett, who served until 1902. Rev. J. W. Boyer then
became pastor and preached until October, 1906, when Rev. D. H. Johnson
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
came in May, 1907, remaining until May, 1909. The church was repaired
during this period. The present pastor is Reverend McGrath. The mem-
bership is two hundred and thirty-one.
PAINTYTLLE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
The church of Paintville — now Mt. Eaton — was organized June 20,
1818, with thirteen members. The Rev. James Adams officiated at the or-
ganization. Up to 1878 this church had on its rolls four hundred and nine
persons. The names of the first members were James and Margaret Kilgore,
Jane McKinney, William Kilgore, Isabelle Kilgore, William Hunter, Mary
Hunter, Rowland Armstrong, Jane Armstrong, John Anderson, Agnes
Anderson, James Galbraith and Sarah Galbraith.
The present membership of this church is eighteen. The present pastor
is supplied.
OTHER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCHES OF THE COUNTY.
Creston is supplied with a pastor at present from other places; it has a
membership of one hundred and fifty-two.
Fredericksburg has one hundred and seventy-eight members.
Shreve has a church of one hundred and eighty-six members; Rev.
Leonard Twinem is the present pastor.
Dalton Presbyterian church has a membership of one hundred and
ninety-nine, with Rev. Joseph V. Findley, as present pastor.
Millersburg has an organization of two hundred and twenty-four mem-
bers. with Rev. Charles J. McCracken as pastor.
West Salem and Congress churches have a membership of one hundred
and twenty-eight, with Rev. Claude R. Culbertson as present pastor.
Doylestown is supplied by other churches; it has a membership of forty-
eight.
Hopewell is supplied by other places : it has a membership of two hundred
and five.
Rittman Presbyterian church has a membership of seventv-five; the pres-
ent pastor is Rev. H. E. Nicklen.
UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
In Wayne county there are now three separate congregations of this de-
nomination— at Wooster. Fredericksburg and Dalton.
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Of the Wooster church it may be stated that the Associate congregation
of Wooster was organized in August, 1817, and Rev. John Walker, D. D.,
and Rev. William Wilson presided at the meeting, which was held in a large
tent erected at the south end of Buckeye street in Wooster.
The Associate Reformed congregation of Wooster was organized in
1843, lts pastor being the Rev. J. H. Peacock. Its worship was commonly
held in the court house.
These two organizations were united into one congregation in 1858,
under the present name of “The United Presbyterian Congregation of Woos-
ter,” having then a total membership of one hundred and twenty. The
pastors of the Associate congregation and the United congregations were :
Rev. Samuel Irwin, from 1819 to 1835; Rev. Joseph McKee from 1837 to
1849; Rev. Hugh Sturgeon from 1852 to 1856; Rev. J. W. McFarland from
1857 to 1864; Rev. R. H. Pollock, D. D., from 1865 to 1875; Rev. Daniel
A. Wallace, D. D., LL.D., from January 1, 1878, to October 20, 1883; Rev.
R. A. Gilfillan, from May 1, 1885, to April 18, 1886; Rev. John A. Wilson,
D. D., from November 1, 1886, to October 29, 1893; Rev. J- D. Irons, D. D.,
from October 1, 1894, to November 1, 1895 J Rev. J- O* Campbell, D. D., from
May 1 7, 1896, to October 15, 1901 ; Rev. W. A. Littell, from March 2, 1902,
to December 1, 1908. The congregation is now without a pastor.
Dr. David A. Wallace was called to a professorship in the Xenia Theo-
logical Seminary of the church, but died at the close of his pastorate in
Wooster. Dr. John A. Wilson was elected to a professorship in the United
Presbyterian Seminary at Allegheny, Pennsylvania; Dr. J. D. Irons was
elected to a professorship in Xenia Theological Seminary and Dr. J. O. Camp-
bell was elected to a professorship in Westminster College, at New Arling-
ton, Pennsylvania.
The first house of worship in Wooster for this denomination was erected
by the Associate congregation in 1819 and stood on South Buckeye street in
the south part of the city. It was a frame building. The second building
was on the same site, erected in 1837. The present church building, located
on North Bever street, is a brick structure erected in 1868, at a cost of
fourteen thousand dollars.
During the pastorate of Dr. David A. Wallace a large and commodious
Sabbath school room was added to the present church building, and during
the pastorate of Dr. John A. Wilson a handsome parsonage was purchased by
the congregation, on East Bowman street.
The elders of this congregation are at present, James T. Stitt, Dr. H. A.
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Hart, W. T. Peckinpaugh and Mahlon Rouch. The trustees are as follows :
J. S. Wallace, William King, Harry Hurst, W. J. Giffen, Dr. L. A. Yocum,
Robert H. Smith and T. E. Ewing. The present membership of this congre-
gation is one hundred and ninety-three.
FREDERICKSBURG UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
The Fredericksburg United Presbyterian church was organized by Rev.
William Wilson, in 1818. Prior to 1858 this congregation was called the
Seceders, or Associate Presbyterians. Some of the first of the church were :
John Sorrel and George Miller, who had settled in the neighborhood in 1812
and 1813; William Truesdale in 1817. and Samuel Miller, David Cox and
George Boon. The first place they called meeting house was built of logs and
stood near the old Associate burying ground on the hill. In 1821 Rev. Sam-
uel Irvine, D. D., was ordained pastor of this and three other congregations.
In 1838 a brick building was built in the southwest part of town. At pres-
ent they worship in one built later. The membership is now fifty-seven, and
the pastor is Rev. W. J. Grimes.
DALTON UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
The United Presbyterian congregation of Dalton was organized by the
Associate Presbytery of Chartiers in 1820 at the home of John McDowell.
Rev. Samuel Irvine was the first stated supply and Rev. Joseph McKee was
the first pastor, his pastorate lasting from 1836 to 1842. Services were first
conducted in private houses and in a tent erected on the farm of James Doug-
las. In 1828 a log church was built, which was used until 1839, when a
frame building was erected in Dalton. The present brick church was erected
in 1871. The following is the succession of pastors: Rev. J. R. Doig, 1842-
1848: Rev. D. W. Collins, D. D., 1850-1852; Rev. J. Y. Ashenhurst, 1854-
1856; Rev. A. McCartney, 1858-1860; Rev. W. M. Gibson, 1863-1867; Rev.
J. G. Madge, 1870-1896: Rev. Will H. Hubbell, the present pastor, was in-
stalled as pastor in June, 1897. The congregation has greatly prospered
under his leadership. There were one hundred members when he took charge
and about one hundred and fifty new members have been added since. The
Sabbath school has grown from an enrollment of fifty-nine to one hundred
and sixty. Not only has the congregation made many improvements on the
church building during the present pastorate, but a fine modem parsonage
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has been built for the pastor. The session at the present time is composed
of Thomas E. McDowell, Allan Arnold, D. C. Rudy and C. R. Snavely.
The board of trustees consists of Albert E. Dague, Lewis S. Berg and Oliver
VV. Hanenstien.
CHURCH OF GOD.
The founder of this denomination was Rev. John Winebrenner, a Ger-
man Reformed minister, who about 1830 preached in Harrisburg. Pennsyl-
vania. He was too excitable to longer be retained and tolerated in the Re-
formed church, and separated from it in 1825 and formed the Church of
God. This church was organized in Pennsylvania and soon planted itself
westward and is now well known in many sections of the country. At Woos-
ter, Ohio, it was organized in May, 1848, by Elder A. Medgrew, with a mem-
bership of but sixteen persons. The officers were : Charles Hoff, elder : J. P.
Winebrenner, deacon. June 27, 1850, the lot and bethel were purchased
from J. P. Winebrenner. Rev. G. U. Ham commenced his labors as pastor
in April. 1851. January 24, 1866, they rented their house to the United
Presbyterian society until they could erect one of their own. Their first
church property was purchased for the sum of sixty-nine dollars and fifty
cents by Mr. Winebrenner from Lindol Sprague and John Hanna, adminis-
trators of the James Clendennen estate. It was the old building to the east of
the present bethel. It was repaired and fitted up for a church and sold at
five hundred and thirty dollars. The new church building was commenced
in 1854, and completed in 1855, by David Atkins, at an expense of four
thousand seven hundred and thirty dollars. It is forty-five by sixty-five feet,
with vestibule and basement above ground. It was dedicated August 5, 1855,
by Elders J. Winebrenner and A. Swartz. On the morning of August 7,
1854. a serious accident befell the workmen at this building. The girders and
rafters for a half of the structure fell to the ground, carrying with the frame
work and timbers the many working men. Citizens soon went to the scene
of disaster, accompanied by physicians. The list of killed and injured is :
Mr. Henderson, of Milbrook, killed: John Cope, of Massillon, wounded;
Henry Miller, hurt; Joseph Kimher, hurt: David Atkins, collar bone broken;
Henry Harris, badly bruised; Charles Pond, fractured bones; John Hamicar,
Charles Hickman, John Vanmeter, D. Baker, A. Hummer and a Mr. Smith,
injured.
At this date the church is still in use. The membership of the congre-
gation is one hundred and sixty and the present pastor is Rev. W. E. Turner.
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This denomination now has churches at Aukerman, Moreland, Smith-
ville and Overton, in Wayne county.
FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP CHURCH OF GOD.
This church was built in 1843, at Moreland. Adam Weiker, Isaac Tate
and Samuel Metzler being the chief movers in the enterprise. The first
preacher of this charge was Archibald Megrew and following him was Jona-
than West. In 1878 the membership had grown to thirty.
ST. JAMES EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
The Wooster parish of the Episcopal church was organized in December,
1840, by Hon. Levi Cox, J. W. Schuckers, Henry Lehman, James Johnson,
J. C. James, David Sloane, George James, John A. Holland, R. H. Cather-
wood and a few other associates, of Wooster and vicinity. They adopted the
constitution and canons of the Protestant Episcopal church in the United
States of America. This parish was incorporated by act of the Legislature
of Ohio in February, 1841. In April, 1841, Rev. Ervin Miller was called to
the rectorship. Services were held in the court house until December, 1841,
when the first services were held in the new church edifice, on West South
street, erected by the parish, on a lot donated by James L. Bowman. Serv-
ices were held there until May, i860, when the building wras regarded as un-
safe and was abandoned and sold, after which services were held in the base-
ment of the English Lutheran church and later in Arcadome Hall until No-
vember, i860, when a new edifice was ready for occupancy. This was built
on the corner of Market and North streets. The first church edifice was
consecrated in May, 1842, by Bishop Mcllvaine, and the new Gothic church
in 1867 bv assistant Bishop Bedell. In 1869-70 the parish erected a frame
building as a rectory.
At present this parish has a good membership and is worshiping in the
church erected in 1867.
METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
The First Methodist church of Wooster was the outgrowth of the
labors and prayers of this devout people, some of whom sought to plant
the seed of Methodism here as early as 1817-18. It is unfortunate for the
present day historian that the records are lost and the exact date of its
organzation cannot be definitely fixed. Up to 1832 the history of this church
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is lacking. At a quarterly conference, held in Wooster, December 15, 1832,
for Wooster circuit and district, William P. Christie appeared as presiding
elder. Class leaders for that day are known to have been A. Stewart, A.
Warner, J. Sampson, D. Chacey, C. Yordy, George Snider, H. Kizer, D.
Black, M. Warner and William Spear.
The Sunday school was organized about 1832, and in 1835 the Wooster
class numbered one hundred and twelve scholars. In April, 1836, William
Spear, Christian Eyster and David Fairfield were appointed a committee to
estimate the cost of building a church. In 1837 a proposition was made to
divide the circuit, embracing all the appointments north of Wooster and the
state road, leading to Mansfield, which was agreed to. In 1837 Adam Poe
was presiding elder, and in 1838 J. H. Power.
June 27, 1840, the trustees of the Methodist church made the following
report :
“First, the meeting house has been pulled down and lies even with the
ground. Second, they have determined to build a new house of the follow-
ing dimensions : seventy-five by fifty feet, a portico eight by thirty, with
columns in front, etc. They have contracted for building the same for two
thousand seven hundred dollars and two thousand five hundred and three
dollars have been subscribed; the building is now in a state of forwardness
and they expect to have the basement fully ready for use by the first of
September next and the house finished sometime during the summer.
“Signed, J. J. Armstrong, Jacob Immel, William Spear, D. P. Hart-
man, M. E. Hamp, D. Black, C. Yordy, Thomas Williams, Trustees.”
October 17, 1840, E. Yocum appears as presiding elder. October 14,
1843, at a quarterly meeting the question arose whether it was best to divide
the circuit and make Wooster a station, which, upon a vote, was carried in
the affirmative, whereupon it was moved and seconded that Bodine and
Smithville appointments be attached to Wooster, which was carried. The
circuit was now divided as before decided by the conference, and Wooster
was constituted a station.
September 21, 1844, E. Raymond appears as presiding elder, D. Black,
William Stitt, D. M. Crall as stewards.
May 6, 1849, the trustees reported the church entirely out of debt, but
suggested some repairs and improvements to the building. William Henry
donated the parsonage grounds.
March 28, 1858, J. Hinton offered the following resolution:
“Whereas, The putting on of gold is a plain violation of Scripture pre-
cept. as well as the rules of our church, therefore, be it
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Resolved, That the members of the Methodist Episcopal conterence
prohibit the use of it in their own families, and discountenance the use of
it by the members of the church.”
After discussion, Rev. J. Durbin presented the following as a substitute,
which was accepted by Mr. Hinton, and passed by the conference:
“Resolved, That we hereby request our pastor to preach discourses at
his own pleasure and convenience, on the subject of dress ; and that we will
sustain him in the execution of the general rules of our discipline, without
exception.”
The subjoined is a complete list of the various pastors who have served
on the charge on which Wooster is situated:
Edward Taylor ....
1820-21
James Gilbreth
1821-22
Peter Stevens
1822-23
John Graham
1823-24
Isaac Ellsbury
1823-24
Tames Murray
S. Meriman
1824-25
Abner Goff
J. C. Taylor
1826-28
C. Carpenter
1826-27
Adam Poe
1828-29
H. Colclozer
1828-29
J. M. McMahan
1829-30
James Wilson
1829-30
James Dixson
1830-31
H. Sheldon
1831-32
J. Hazzard
1831-32
E. M. Dalbey
1831-32
L. Bevans
1832-33
S. Ruark
1833-34
P. P. Ayers
1833-34
W. Runnels
1834-36
C. R. Lovel
1835-36
E. Thompson
1835-36
E. Yocum
1836-37
Thomas Dunn
1836-38
George Smith
1837-38
H. R. Parish 1837-38
E. C. Gavitt 1 838-39
W. L. Harris 1 838-39
David Gray 1839-41
Cyrus Sawyer 1839-40
C. B. Brandenburg 1840-41
Thomas Barkdull 1841-42
J. N. Kellum 1841-43
William D. Drisho 1842-43
G. W. Howe 1843-44
R. H. Chubb 1843-44
E. R. Jewett 1844-45
Cyrus Sawyer 1845-47
H. E. Pitcher 1847-48
L. B. Gurley 1850-52
L. S. Yourtee 1852-53
Jesse Durbin 1853-54
H. S. Brodley 1854-55
T. S. Kalb 1855-56
W. H. Seeley 1856-58
H. G. DuBois 1858-60
L. Warner 1860-61
M. C. K. Hard 1861-62
C. L. Foot 1862-64
A. R. Palmer 1864-66
J. Mallock 1866-68
George Mather . 1868-70
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G. W. Pepper
1870-72 R. T. Stevenson
. . . . 1886-89
A. Nelson
— 1890-95
O. Badgley
1874-76 J. Frank Smith
— 1895-00
G. A. Hughes
1876-79 John H. Deeds
. . . . 1900-04
I. H. McConnell
1879-81 Edgar V. DuBois
. . . . 1904-00
N. S. Albright
1881-84 Charles L. Johnson . . .
. . . . 1906-00
George Mather
. . . . 1909 —
The more recent year presiding elders (district superintendents) are:
Rev. G. A. Hughes, 1879-83; Rev. E. Persons, 1887-93; Rev. P. B. Stroup,
1887-99; Rev. George Mather, 1893-99; Rev. A. D. Knapp, 1899; Rev.
Keys, present incumbent.'
On a Sunday morning in February, about 1885, the old Methodist
church building burned. Insurance was carried to the extent of four thou-
sand dollars, which was promptly paid and this enabled the society to go
ahead with new building plans. Right at that juncture, the Trinity church
of the same denomination, which owned and used a small brick church where
now stands the First Episcopal building, concluded to unite, or rather re-
unite, for they had left the parent church some years before, and so the
property of the two congregations was united and the Trinity building was
taken down and the present First Methodist church building was erected at
a cost of about thirty-five thousand dollars. In the year 1906 a very fine
pipe organ was added to the church. Its cost was about four thousand five
hundred dollars, and Andrew Carnegie donated one-third of the amount,
one thousand five hundred dollars.
The present membership of this church is seven hundred. Considering
the fact that Wooster is largely a Presbyterian place (owing to the uni-
versity influence and interests), the Methodist church is indeed a strong,
influential denomination and is doing most effective work.
TRINITY METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, WOOSTER.
This is one of the more modern churches of this denomination. It
dates its organization from November 23, 1872, and then started out with
a membership of thirty-five. The St. James Episcopal church was rented
for the use of the newly formed society. The first pastor was Rev.
John Toner, of Canton, Ohio. The first official board was as follows:
stewards. Daniel Black, Henry C. Harris, C. M. Amsden, J. C. Knoble, F.
L. Parsons. John Van Meter, W. S. Leyburn : trustees. D. Q. Liggett, B.
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Barrett, John H. Silvers, J. H. Carr, W. M. Pinkerton, J. B. Power, T. Y.
McCray, M. K. Hard. C. V. Hard.
In 1874 it was determined to erect a house of worship and about the
middle of June the work was begun on a lot on the corner of North Market
and Larwill streets, where a new, handsome structure rapidly rose. In size
it was fifty-eight by ninety-two feet and seated four hundred, while the Sun-
day school room accommodated fully two hundred more. This building was
dedicated January 24, 1875. The first sermon was preached by Rev. D. S.
Gregory, D. D., of Wooster University, and the regular dedicatory sermon
was by Bishop W. N. Ninde, D. D., then of the Northwestern University.
Chicago. In 1878 the membership of this church was even two hundred.
Early in the eighties this church, after the burning of the old First Methodist
Episcopal building, united with that church and since then only one Methodist
church has existed in Wooster. The brick church above named was torn
down and the present fine edifice was erected as common property of the
united congregation — the First church putting in the insurance money it
had received and other monies and the Trinity people putting in the lot and
material of their church.
FREDERICKSBURG METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
The First Methodist Episcopal church of Fredericksburg was built in 1830
and stood south of town. The first minister in charge was Rev. H. O.
Sheldon. The second edifice erected was built in i860. Some of the earlier
members of this charge were : John Miller and family, David Griffith and
family, Samuel Brown and family, Robert Armstrong, Sr., J. R. Armstrong,
Jacob Kiser (the singing shoemaker), Stinson McWilliams, Nancy Sefton
and family, C. P. Tennant and family, R. S. McEvven and family.
The church, at present, has a membership of two hundred and fifty-eight.
Besides this there was an early-day organized Presbyterian church in
Sugarcreek township.
CANAAN TOWNSHIP METHODISM.
A Methodist Episcopal church was erected in Windsor in 1850-51,
which they continued to occupy until 1874, when they again built a neat
edifice. Among the early members here may be remembered the Strat-
tons. Notestines. Wiles. Van Doorens, Haskins. Stephenson. Haws and
others.
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"BEND CHURCH.”
This was the name of a church built in Canaan township in 1831-32,
through Dr. Barnes, a minister of that denomination who had preached at
that point as early as 1815. The earliest to attend and support this society
were the Weeds, Bowmans, Strattons, Kearns, Thrapps, Zuvers and Hills.
The church became extinct just prior to the Civil war, yet the ‘‘Bend Metho-
dists” left their impression on the community.
METHODISM IN FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP.
The First Methodist Episcopal church was built in Moreland about
1830, and was a one-story frame building thirty by thirty feet, located on
Robert Buckley's land and was donated by him for church uses. For the
first fifteen years before the church was built services were held at private
houses, generally at that of William P. Force. The second church was
built in the summer of 1863. At present, 1909, the church has a member-
ship of one hundred and sixty.
CRESTON METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
Methodism in this immediate section began its work at Jackson at a
very early date — about 1850. In 1863 the old frame church at Jackson
was moved to Creston and stood on the site of the present church. The
old building served until 1884, when the present brick church was erected
at a cost of eight thousand dollars. It is sixty-one by sixty feet, to which
has been added during the last year parlor and Sunday school room thirty
by thirty feet that cost two thousand dollars.
The present membership, in good standing, is two hundred and eighty.
W. A. Wells has served this church as its recording steward and generally
had charge of the collections and finances of the church for the past thirty
years. Through his management, the treasury always has a credit when
conference meets.
The following have served as pastors in the order here named since
1850: Revs. M. T. Ward. A. R. Palmer, Munsinger, Reeder, Jones, Moffett,
Owen, Peters, Col. S. R. Clark, Wells. T. S. Warner. Hushouse, Huntsberger,
Warner, Saholzer, Snyder, Wager, Whitnorth. Peterson, S. E. Sears, and
present pastor (1909), C. D. Castle.
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METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH AT ORRVILLE.
A Methodist Episcopal church was formed in the district in which
Orrville was situated as early as 1853 by Joseph Hayes, and services were
held in a school house in the western part of the little village. Among its
first members were David Huston, leader; Mrs. Joanna Hayes, Daniel Hoover
and wife, Mrs. Mary Van Buskirk, Father Wilford, a local preacher, and Mr.
and Mrs. Skelton. They completed their church edifice in 1868-69 and it was
dedicated by Rev. Alfred Wheeler. Pastors who served this church in the
order here given are (since 1869) : Revs. Clinton Craven, N. J. Close, A. E.
Thomas, Philip Kelser, J. L. Sanford, J. T. McCartney, W. Reese, J. F.
Brant. Freshwater, Ashbaugh, F. S. Wolfe, Boothe, Dunbar, Slutz, Barnett,
Hyde, Meyer and Fleming.
The present membership is two hundred and fifty. The cornerstone of
the church has this dating, “1866-1905,” meaning the date of old and. new
edifices. The new building is perhaps the finest in Wayne county. Its stone
walls and elegant finishings make it all round modern. Its cost was eighteen
thousand dollars. It stands on Church street, and was dedicated by Dr.
Mitchell of Cleveland, now of Chicago.
OTHER METHODIST CHURCHES.
Other Methodist Episcopal churches within Wayne county in 1909 have
a membership, as shown by the 1908 conference minutes, as follows: Apple-
creek, 210; Burbank, 144; Congress, 170: Dalton, 275; Doylestown, 170;
Marshallville, 95; Moreland, 160; Shreve, 209; Smithfield and Canaan, 134;
West Salem, 183.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCHES.
It appears that Catholicism first had its start in Wayne county in the
early forties and St. Mary’s church was erected in 1847 at Wooster. The
cornerstone was laid during that year in the month of September by Arch-
bishop Purcell. The first resident priest was Father Champion, succeeded
by Fathers Brennan, Haley, O’Neal, Arnold, Gallaher and Ankly. When
the church was erected there were but fifteen resident members, but by 1878
it had increased to over a hundred members.
The old burying ground, to the east of the church, was used until Jan-
uary, 1871, when the first lot Was sold in the new cemetery to Joseph Holland.
In 1869 Father Ankly purchased these grounds from David Robison, Jr.,
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paying therefor two hundred dollars per acre for ten acres. The beautiful
brick parsonage was built in 1906 at a cost of seven thousand, two hundred
dollars. The same church is in use that was erected in 1847 anc^ seems as
good as the day it was built, due to honest workmanship.
This congregation now numbers eighty families. Father Fridolin Ankly
has been in charge of this congregation since the autumn of 1865 — forty-
four years. He is a native of Switzerland, came to America when eighteen
years of age, was partly educated in Europe and finished here. He served
in Sandusky, Ohio, before coming here; also in Cleveland. Protestants and
Catholics alike vie with one another to do this man of God honor. He is
one of Ohio’s most venerable priests and makes friends wherever he goes.
This church is now styled the Immaculate Preferred Conception.
The original organ for this church came from Westfield, Massachusetts,
and cost one thousand dollars. In 1866 the bell was bought in St. Louis at
one thousand and four hundred dollars and weighed (gross) three thousand
five hundred pounds.
ST. MICHAEL'’ S CATHOLIC CHURCH.
This Catholic church was erected in Baughman township in 1849 by
Ambrose Halter, and the first priest was P. Morat. The church here is now
known as St. Joseph’s, and numbers seventeen families.
MILTON TOWNSHIP CATHOLIC CHURCH.
A Catholic church was erected in Milton township in 1858, the corner-
stone having been laid July 26, 1858. This embraced the so-called “French
Settlement,” and lately the church has laid a cornerstone for a new building
to be located at the town of Rittman, where there are twenty families of this
faith.
At Orrville the church has purchased two lots on the corner of High
and Elm street where they contemplate building a church soon.
STS. PETER ANI) PAUL’S CATHOLIC CHURCH.
This church is located at Doylestown and was organized a mile to the
south of the present town in 1827. Their first building was a log structure
twenty-eight by forty feet, which served until 1849, when a church was erected
(18)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
on the site of the present magnificent church in the village. This was thirty-
six by sixty feet in size and cost four thousand dollars. This served until
1877 when the present brick church was erected at a cost of thirteen thousand
dollars, now worth twenty-five thousand dollars. It is fifty-six by one hun-
dred and ten feet in size and its ceilings are forty feet high. Recently the
church has built a fine two-story brick school building near the church. The
present membership of this congregation is about eighty families.
FRENCH SETTLEMENT CHURCH.
The work among the Catholics began here in 1855 and in July, 1858,
a church was dedicated — a frame building which is still standing. A frame
church was built in 1909 costing four thousand dollars. The Catholic work
in this section is being rapidly transferred to Rittman, the railroad point,
and is all served by the priest at Doylestown at this date.
AT STERLING.
The work here was established in 1883 and that year there was bought
a frame house twenty-eight by thirty-five feet that had been a school house.
This work will also be removed to Rittman eventually.
DIED AMONG STRANGERS.
On September 20, 1832, Father Ed D. Fenwick, a bishop, died at
Wooster, among strangers, there being no Catholic hand to administer the
last sacrament to him. No Catholics lived in the place at that time.
SONNEBERG SWISS MENNONITE CONGREGATION.
In Sugarcreek township is located one branch of the Mennonite church —
the one above named. The total membership of this congregation is now
four hundred and seventeen. Its ministers are Jacob Nussbaum (bishop),
C. N. Amstutz, J. S. Moser (ministers), J. J. Moser (deacon). A Sunday
school is in connection with the church work.
Sonneberg is neither a town nor postoffice — simply a German Menno-
nite settlement which received its name from the first settlers who emigrated
direct from Switzerland where they had lived on a mountain called in Ger-
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man, ‘Sonneberg.” Hundreds of years ago the rulers of Switzerland had a
prejudice against the faith of the Mennonites and hence bitterly opposed
and persecuted them, and they were compelled to flee to the mountains, where
they were not allowed to live in towns or to own land, and were forced to
farm wild mountain lands and pay high rent for the same. In 1817 Benedict
Schraag started for America and located in Green township, near Orrville,
Ohio. He wrote to his friends telling them what opportunities there were
in America for the Mennonite people. They persuaded Isaac Sommer,
David Kirchhofer, Peter and Ulrich Lehman to come to America. They
started from Berne in April, 1819, boarded the ship “La Havre,” from France,
and after a forty-seven-days voyage landed in New York, from which place
they went on foot to Ohio, via Lancaster, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and on
through Canton, Ohio, to within four miles of Wooster, Wayne county, near
the southwest corner of land now owned by the Ohio Experimental Station,
where they lived in a school house for over a month. After traveling around
for some time they bought a piece of timber land from the government,
James Monroe then being President of the United States. The purchase was
made in the center of what is now known as the Sonneberg settlement. They
at once began to fell the giant forest trees and clear up land on which to raise
grain and vegetables upon which to subsist. There was no money and all
the settlers about them spoke a strange language ; they had to exchange prod-
uce for other articles, as there was no market for what they raised. One of
their number rode to Canton, twenty miles away, with a sack of wheat, the
grist for four families. They were ever glad, however, that they came to free
America. In 1821 seven families more came across the ocean to join them.
Among this number were John Lehman. Abraham Zuerich, Jacob Bixler
and others. In 1824 came Christian Beer, Peter and John Welty, John and
Abraham Tschantz, David Baumdarder, Ulrich Sommer and Peter Schneck.
Others came in 1825 and located in Greene township, near the Old People’s
Home.
The first minister in the Sonneberg congregation was John Lehman,
who arrived from Switzerland in 1821. The first to be ordained of this con-
gregation was Ulrich Sommers and Peter Schneck. This was in 1827 and
two years later Peter Schneck was ordained a bishop.
The first baptismal service was held in 1828. The first marriage per-
formed was on December 31, 1822, that of Ulrich Lehman and Barbara
Gerber. The first death to occur in the settlement was that of Elizabeth, wife
of Ulrich Gerber, in September, 1823.
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Church services were held in private dwellings until 1834, when the
first church was built; it was rebuilt in 1861, and again in 1907, when the
building was dedicated on September 29th. Its cost was six thousand dollars.
Since 1828 more than seven hundred persons have been received into the
church by baptism ; over three hundred couples united in marriage and more
than four hundred deaths have occurred. In this congregation there are now
one hundred and fifteen families, or over four hundred single memberships.
AMISH MENNONITE CHURCH.
This branch of the Amish Mennonite church was organized in 1816 in
Green township, Wayne county, with six or eight families, or about twenty
members. They conducted their services in private houses until 1862, when
they erected their first house of worship, one mile east of Smithville, a frame
structure, at the cost of three thousand dollars. This house served well its
purpose until 1905, when a new building was erected at the same place ai a
cost of about seven thousand dollars. In 1880 the congregation erected a
church edifice in Milton township at a cost of about two thousand dollars, and
since conducts regular services at both places. Its present membership is
about six hundred.
The first ministers were Daniel Zook (Zug for German) and Christian
Brandt, who organized the church. The bishops, since its organization, have
been Christian Shantz, Jacob Yoder, John K. Yoder; the last named served
forty-five years, and since 1896 its bishop has been Benjamin Gerig. The as-
sistant ministers are Jacob S. Gerig, C. Z. Yoder and D. Z. Yoder. The
church is active in home and foreign missionary work ; several of its members
have been to far-away India where the church helps to support a number of
mission stations. Some are at work in the home missions that are scattered
from east to \vest in some of the larger cities.. The church also helps to
support other church institutions, such as the publishing house, old people’s
home, orphans' home, schools, etc., and is interested in the evangelistic work
throughout the world.
Much might be added concerning the good work being accomplished
by this devout people who are among the most thrifty and law-abiding citizens
within Wayne county, but in a work of the character of this the above will
suffice.
MENNONITE CHURCH OF SUGARCREEK TOWNSHIP.
This branch of the Mennonite church is a strain of the original Mennon-
ite church of America and is under the Mennonitish conference of Ohio
that meets annually in different parts of this state. They endeavor to teach
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277
the whole gospel of Jesus Christ and make it practical in their daily lives.
As a people, they are industrious and are, for the most part, farmers. They
are hospitable, kind and generous, and opposed to war, secret societies, swear-
ing of oaths and conforming to the world. This branch of the Mennonite
church has a membership of about two hundred and fifty.
It had its beginning in 1834 when it was organized in this county. John
Bohrer and Jacob Buchwalter came from Lancaster county, Pennsylvania,
and settled southeast of Orrville and organized what is known as the Martin
church. This band was soon followed by others of like faith, including the
Martins, Lengers, Brennemans and others, after which the church grew
rapidly. A few years later a second church was built across the line in Stark
county to accommodate the people. A few years after that a third church
was built, called Salem church; this was south of Smithville, and in 1909 a
fourth church was organized at Orrville. These several buildings were
erected at an average cost of about three thousand dollars.
These four churches are under one charge, with Bishop Michael Horst,
of Orrville, as their old retired bishop. I. J. Buchwalter, of Dalton, grandson
of the above named Jacob Buchwalter, as their active bishop, has general
oversight of the church’s work and he is assisted in his duties by the following
ministers: A. H. Brenneman, Marshallville : David Hostetler, Weilersville;
David Martin. Dalton, and Aaron Eberlev. of Dalton. The deacons are
John Hackman, Orrville; S. K. Plank, Orrville; William Shoup, Orrville;
Abe Burkholder, Orrville.
This church helps in the noble support of the Mennonites' Old Peo-
ple's Home, near Rittman, as well as assists in the organization of other
church societies in adjoining counties. Sunday schools and young people's
meetings are kept up with much interest at its different places of holding
meetings ; they also do a good foreign missionary work.
SALEM MENNONITE CHURCH.
The Salem Mennonite church was organized in 1887 with sixteen mem-
bers, and is located in Sugarcreek township, southwest of Dalton. A neat
and comfortable church was built in 1887 at a cost of eighteen hundred dol-
lars, and improvements to the amount of one thousand dollars were put on
the building in 1895. I n connection with the church there is a well-organized
Sunday school of two hundred and twelve members, of which J. H. Tschantz
has been superintendent for the last fifteen consecutive years. There is also
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
a Christian Endeavor Society of sixty members and a Ladies’ Aid Society
of thirty-five members. The present pastor is A. A. Sommer, with the fol-
lowing officers: John Badertscher and A. J. Welty, deacons or elders; Sam
Geiger, J. H. Tschantz and Philemon Sprunger, trustees. The church now
has a membership of one hundred and sixty-three. The church, as a whole,
is organized into a missionary society and the first Sunday of each month is
set aside as a missionary Sunday, when a special program is carried out and
an offering taken for missionary purposes.
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH.
The only organization of the Congregational people within this county
is the church at Fredericksburg, whose pastor is Rev. W. T. Williams.
OTHER EARLY CHURCHES.
Among the churches and religious societies in Wayne county, not classi-
fied and written of in their regular denominational order the following should
not be forgotten :
Oak Chapel, Methodist — The old log edifice was erected in 1827, and
was dedicated by Rev. Russell Bigelow. A new church was provided in 1861,
dedicated by Rev. Adam Poe. In 1877 ^ was repaired, a cupola added and
a bell introduced. The society was flourishing in the eighties, and it may be
added that this building stood near the site of the old-time camp meeting
grounds of 1818 held in Plain township.
Geyer’s chapel was completed in 1876, the project of building having
been agitated since 1862. Bishop Markwood dedicated it January 27, 1863.
The first class was organized there in 1863, with a membership of seven.
From that small beginning grew up a prosperous church.
The first church built in Clinton township was that erected by the Dis-
ciples about a mile and a half northeast of Shreve, on the James Moore
farm.
The Methodist Episcopal church near Newkirk’s Spring was the first of
that denomination in this township and it was built in 1843. David H.. son
of Henry and Jane Newkirk, was the first person buried in the graveyard
by this church.
The churches in Greene township were spoken of by Douglas in his 1878
history of Wayne county as follows :
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279
“There are nine different churches represented in this township; Metho-
dists, organized in 1814; the Amish, in 1816; the German Baptists, in 1826;
the Presbyterians, in 1830; the Winebrenarians, in 1839; the Brethren of
Christ, in 1843; Evangelical Lutherans, in 1844; the United Brethren, in
1845, and the River Brethren/'
If there are other churches whose history is omitted in this work, it is
because the officers have failed to respond to the call of our historian for nec-
essary data from which to form such historical sketch.
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CHAPTER XIV.
FRATERNAL SOCIETIES.
In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation;
Thought will not work except in silence;
Virtue will not grow unless its roots are hidden.
FREEMASONRY.
Almost with the planting of the first colony of pioneers in Wayne
county Masonry took root, and has, with the passing of the decades, flour-
ished well.
Ebenezer Lodge No. 33, Free and Accepted Masons, was organized, as
seen by the date of the charter. January 4, 1816, that instrument, however,
being dated December 13, 1819. The charter members were as follows:
Thomas G. Jones, Thomas McMillen, William K. Stewart, Abner Eddy,
William Larwill, Thomas Thorp, Constant- Lake, Plumb Sutliff. Joseph H.
Larwill.
The number of members in this lodge in 1909 was one hundred and
seventy-two, and the officers for that year were as follows : Lester E. Wolfe,
worshipful master; John W. Ames, senior warden; H. Wayne Hart, junior
warden; John Stevens, Jr., treasurer; James B. Minier. secretary; James C.
Poole, senior deacon; Harry C. Sweeny, junior deacon; William F. Pate,
senior steward; Oscar D. Kaufman, junior steward; James B. Minier, chap-
lain; George S. Limb, tyler.
Wooster Chapter No. 27, Royal Arch Masons, dates its charter from
October 23, 1843. The charter members were: William Larwill, Horace
Howard, William Warren, Jacob Van Houten, Kimbal Porter, Philo
Welton, Nathaniel High, John P. Coulter, John A. Holland.
In 1878 the chapter had a membership of seventy-eight. Its present
membership is one hundred and eighty, including non-residents. Present
officers: Fred J. Leopold, high priest; Carl M. Limb, king; James C. Poole,
scribe; George J. Schwartz, captain of the host; John M. Russell, principal
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28l
sojourner; John W. Ames, royal arch captain; Samuel H. Boyd, treasurer;
James B. Minier, secretary; William F. Pate, grand master of third veil;
Harry C. Sweeny, grand master of second veil; J. Frick Tyler, grmd master
of first veil; George S. Limb, guard.
The home of Masonry in Wooster is now in leased rooms within the
Frick Memorial building on West Liberty street.
Wooster Council No. 13, Royal and Select Masters, was chartered Oc-
tober 1, 1846. The charter members were: Kimbal Porter, S. Buckius,
George D. Hine, Horace Howard, George H. Stewart, N. Haskell, A. Bartol.
J. W. Crawford, L. L. Klein, Peter Van West.
The council, in 1878, had a membership of thirty-five. Its present mem-
bership is two hundred and fourteen. Present (1909) officers: John M.
Russell, thrice illustrious master; W. F. Pate, deputy master; Samuel H.
Boyd, principal conductor of the work; John Stevens, Jr., treasurer; L. R.
Kramer, recorder; C. M. Limb, captain of guard; Lester E. Wolfe, con-
ductor of candidate ; J. C. Poole, steward ; George S. Limb, sentinel.
Wooster Commandery No. 48, Knights Templar, was chartered August
14, 1889. Its present officers are: E. Sir Knight Carl M. Limb, eminent
commander; Sir Kt. Lester S. Lewis, generalissimo; P. E. Sir Kt. John M.
Russell, captain general; Sir Kt. David D. Miller, senior warden; Sir
Kt. Marcus R. Limb, junior warden; P. E. Sir Kt. James B. Minier, prelate;
P. E. Sir Kt. Samuel H. Boyd, treasurer; P. E. Sir Kt. Fred J. Leopold,
recorder ; Sir Kt. Thomas Drew, standard bearer ; Sir Knight James C. Poole,
sword bearer; Sir Kt. Harry C. Sweeny, warder.
The membership. July 1, 1908, was one hundred and eighty-six. Past
eminent commanders of this commandery have been as follows: P. E. Sir
Kt. Thomas E. Peckinpaugh, 1889: P. E. Sir Kt. William W. Firestone,
1891 ; P. E. Sir Kt. Samuel H. Boyd, 1893; P. E. Sir Kt. James B. Minier,
1895 ; P. E. Sir Kt. Harry K. Brady, 1896; P. E. Sir Kt. George J. Schwartz,
1897; P- E. Sir Kt. Ross W. Funck, 1898; P. E. Sir Kt. John Stevens, Jr.,
1899; P. E. Sir Kt. Walter D. Foss, 1900; P. E. Sir Kt. Forbes Alcock, 1901 ;
P. E. Sir Knight Ell P. Willaman. 1901 ; P. E. Sir Kt. Charles M. Gray.
1902; P. E. Sir Kt. Harry E. Kurtz, 1903; P. E. Sir Kt. David Nice, 1904;
P. E. Sir Kt. Ezra Neikirk, 1905: P. E. Sir Kt. John M. Russell, 1906; P.
E. Sir Kt. Frederick J. Leopold, 1907.
Chapter No. 270, Order of the Eastern Star, on January 1, 1909, en-
joyed a membership of fifty-two.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Other Masonic lodges in Wayne county are : Cedar Lodge No. 430, at
Orrville; Garfield Lodge No. 528, at Shreve; West Salem Lodge No. 398;
Oriental Chapter No. 128, West Salem.
WEST SALEM LODGE.
West Salem Masonic Lodge No. 398 was organized under a dispensa-
tion granted petitioners November 21, 1866. Its charter members were : H.
P. Sage, Edwin Fritzinger, C. C. Clay, M. H. Dodd, David Ambrose, J. B.
Houk, D. F. Young, Enoch Moore, S. W. Signs, Jacob McGlenn, John
Buffett, J. H. Morrison, Isaac Harbaugh, Israel Moyer, James Lowe.
ODDFELLOWSHIP.
Wooster Lodge No. 42, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, was organ-
ized, as seen by its charter, June 21, 1845. The charter members were: R.
J. Eberman, William S. Johnson, George Brauneck, J. S. Ward, R. A.
Kinney. Its membership, in 1878, had reached one hundred and fifty-two,
and January 1, 1909, was three hundred and seventy-three. Its officers at
present are : George Lautzenheiser, noble grand ; Julius Gerlach, vice grand ;
H. H. Miller, financial secretary; W. E. Barnard, recording secretary; J. R.
Warner, treasurer. The trustees are A. Plank, J. T. Keister and J. A. Shamp.
Kilbuck Encampment No. 17, Patriarchs Militant, was chartered Sep-
tember 5, 1846, with members as follows: William S. Johnson, R. J. Eber-
man, John Bristle, P. P. Eckfield, William W. Hanna, Jacob C. Chapman,
John M. Naylor, Solomon R. Bonewitz, Samuel Mentzer, Samuel Christine,
J. W. Schuckers, Isaac N. Jones. In June, 1878, this body had a membership
of eighty, and the present membership is one hundred and forty-nine. The
officers are, at this date, Harry Smith, chief patriarch ; Julius Gerloch, senior
warden; R. T. Bechtel, financial scribe; E. O. Powers, recording scribe; J.
A. Schamp, high priest; Harry Baumgardner, treasurer. This is the only
encampment in Wayne county.
There are Odd Fellows lodges at the following points in this county:
Orrville, with a membership of one hundred fifty-five; Doylestown, with a
membership of one hundred and six ; West Salem, with a membership of
seventy-seven; Creston, with a membership of thirty-seven; Fredericksburg,
with a membership of thirty-nine: Dalton, with a membership of forty-six;
Applecreek, with thirty-four members.
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West Salem Lodge No. 442 was instituted June 10, 1870, with charter
members as follows: John S. Addleman, M. H. Huffman, W. H. Fishack,
J. S. Carmack, W. C. Baker, John Keeler, Neal Patterson.
Orrville Lodge No. 490 was instituted July 26, 1871, with the following
charter members: H. P. Hugus, A. W. Bombarger, A. E. Clark, Isaac H.
Krieble, Harrison Bowman, John Dunn, J. C. St. John.
At Doylestown the lodge was instituted August 17, 1854, and now
has a live membership of one hundred and twelve. They own a fine block
in which their lodge room is situated and a part is leased to the Knights of
Pythias. The charter members were as follows: William H. Redinger,
Samuel Rouston, Washington M. Heffelman, Uriah Franks, William
Spangler.
The order at Wooster purchased its own building on South Market
street October 1, 1901, at a cost of nine thousand dollars.
KNIGHTS OF PYTHIAS.
Rising Star Lodge No. 22, Knights of Pythias, at Wooster, was instituted
April 1, 1870. The date of its charter is February 1, 1871, and the charter
members were as follows : John H. Carr, Albert Braunick, Henry J. Kauff-
man, Samuel Rouston, John M. Ebey, Michael S. Goodman, Arnold Richen-
bach, Augustus E. Gasche, Charles S. Frost, John S. Caskey, John K. Mc-
Bride, Leander Firestone. In January, 1878, this lodge had a membership of
forty-two knights. Its present membership is two hundred and four.
Morning Star Lodge No. 41, Knights of Pythias (German), was insti-
tuted December 29, 1871, its charter bearing date of February 15, 1872. The
charter membership was as follows: William Nold, John J. Bringger, Jacob
Stark, Frederick Schuch, Gotlieb Gasche. Jacob Diehl, Hermann Wutke,
Jacob Gross, Eberhardt Bideker, Emil Podlich, Leonard Saal, George Faber,
William Gasche, Jacob Schopf, Emil Faber, William Kanzler. Peter Kanzler,
Franz Gerlach. Heinrich Kinkier, Martin F. Limb.
In 1878 the lodge had a working membership of seventy -two knights.
On June 18, 1907, this lodge was united with the Rising Star Lodge. The
present (1909) officers of the combined lodge are as follows: G. E. Brown,
chancellor commander, Lloyd Sanborn, vice-chancellor; Benton G. Hay,
prelate; William A. Stevens, master of work; V. P. Moses, keeper of
records and seal ; R. B. Snyder, master of finance ; John Stevens, Jr., master of
exchecquer; Harvey Joliff, master-at-arms; Frank Ault, inner guard; Karl
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Ernest, outer guard. This order meets over Keister Bros.’ grocery store on
East Market street in a leased hall.
Other Knights of Pythias lodges in Wayne county are: Sterling Lodge,
at Sterling, with a membership of one hundred and thirty-one ; George Gless-
ner, keeper of records and seal; Grace Lodge No. 184 has a membership at
Doylestown of eighty members, with O. B. Heffleman as keeper of records and
seal; Central Lodge No. 212, at Orrville, with a membership of one hundred,
with W. T. Frazer as keeper of records and seal; Applecreek Lodge No. 324,
at Applecreek, with a membership of forty-eight, with H. H. Wilhelm as
keeper of records and seal ; Smithville Lodge No. 483, with twenty-three mem-
bers, at Smithville, with W. G. Stevens as keeper of records and seal ; Chal-
lenge Lodge No. 630, at Shreve, with a membership of forty-four, with W. K.
Miller as keeper of records and seal.
The Uniform Rank of Wooster, known as Funk Company No. 53, was
instituted October 18, 1900. It has a present membership of thirty-six. Its
1909 officials are: J. J. Keister, captain; Samuel Manson, first lieutenant;
G. Brown, second lieutenant; Ed McCormick, recorder; H. A. Haller, treas-
urer; E. J. Kaufman, guard; Charles Schopf, sentinel.
IMPROVED ORDER OF RED MEN.
Unas Tribe No. 57 at Wooster of this fraternal organization was insti-
tuted May 20, 1871, with the following charter members: Albert Brauneck,
Thomas S. Johnson, Jesse E. Goodyear, John S. Caskey, George Brauneck,
G. W. Doty, James E. Wescott, J. T. Maxwell, T. Tickner, W. H. Baumgard-
ner, Samuel Rouston, D. E. Warner, Speers McClarran, Henry J. Kauffman,
T e : is P. Chliger, Charles S. Frost. Perry Miller, David W. Matz, Henry
McClarran. John K. McBride, Abraham Saybolt, Jr., David McDonald, Allen
Clark, D. W. Immel, Edward P. Bates, Henry J. Huber, Jacob R. Bowman,
T. E. Peckingpaugh, C. C. Parsons, Jr.
ROYAL ARCANUM.
Wayne Council No. 13 of this secret beneficiary and life insurance order
(similar to the Knights of Honor) at Wooster was instituted September 3,
1877. Its charter members were: Daniel Funck, Joseph C. Plumer, Lewis
P. Ohliger. John Van Nostran, Tehiel Clark, T. S. Bissell, George Plumer.
Edward S. Dowell. David W. Matz. T. J. McElhenie, T. E. Peckenpaugh. A.
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285
Saybolt, Jr., William H. Harry, Dr. James D. Robison, H. H. Bissell, Martin
Funck, J. D. McAfee, M. A. Miller, Silas W. Ogden, William F. Woods.
KNIGHTS OF HONOR.
Orr Lodge, Knights of Honor, was instituted July 9, 1875. The officers
were: Rev. J. C. Kauffman, director; William M. Orr, past director; S. N.
Coe, vice-director; S. D. D. Tanner, assistant director; J. S. Evans, guide;
A. J. Heller, reporter; J. G. Hartman, financial reporter; John Coffee, treas-
urer; Rev. J. M. Jenkins, chaplain; George Ream, guardian; Solon Boydston,
sentinel.
This lodge has for its object mutual life insurance and social functions.
Its establishment at the town of Orrville gathered together a goodly number
of the people — men and women — who, besides having an excellent mutual life
assurance benefit, by the payment of small dues, also had a good time socially.
At Shreve the Knights of Honor instituted a lodge June 19, 1875, w^h
the following as its charter members : E. Fritzinger, John Zehner, C. C.
Stouffer, M. D., J. S. Cole, M. D., Uriah Clouse, Z. B. Allee, W. R. McClel-
lan, R. L. Lashels, L. H. Plank, George Musser, A. J. Gearhart, A. Plank,
Jr., H. E. Lind, F. M. Atterholt, Robert McKibbens, N. H. Neal, J. R.
Saltman, Ben Meyers, J. A. Case, J. N. McHose, and has forty-one mem-
bers in all.
GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC.
In Wayne county there have been, since 1881, formed several posts
of the Grand Army of the Republic, including those at Wooster, Shreve,
Dalton, Doylestown, Fredericksburg, West Salem, Orrville, Creston, Smith-
ville, New Pittsburg and Burbank. Those that have a sufficient number of
the old comrades of ’61 and ’65 at this date (1909) to hold meetings and
transact business are as follows : Wooster, Shreve, Dalton, West Salem,
Orrville, Creston, New Pittsburg.
Given Post, No. 133, was formed as a part of the Ohio Department,
Grand Army of the Republic, on September 12, 1881. The post now num-
bers about seventy-six, but from one date to another it has contained on its
rolls as many as three hundred and fifty soldiers. The present elective officers
of this post are as follows: Commander. William Hummer; senior vice-com-
mander, R. J. Smith; junior vice-commander, W. H. Myers; chaplain, S. J.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Blake; quartermaster, Enos Pierson; officer of the day, A. R. Boffmyer;
surgeon, Harvey Porter; officer of the guard, Otto Bardon.
The list of commanders since the post’s organization is as follows:
1881, J. P. VanNest; 1882, J. N. Clark; 1883, D. C. Curry; 1884, Jehiel
Clark; 1884, Peter Sparr; 1885, C. W. McClure; 1886, H. McClarran; 1887,
Robert J. Smith; 1888, Aquila Wiley; 1889, Geo. W. Reid; 1890, A. Bran-
steter; 1891, J. E. Applebaugh; 1892, P. B. Stroup; 1893, A. M. Trunk;
1894, Samuel Metzler; 1895, S. J. Blake; 1896, Enos Pierson; 1897, J. R.
McKinney; 1898, I. N. Keiffer; 1898, R. Elson; 1899, C. V. Hard; 1900,
J. T. Yarman; 1901, J. B. Taylor; 1902, Jesse McClellen; 1903, C. H. Hes-
ler; 1904, W. O. Beebe; 1905, Thomas Everly; 1906, T. A. Elder; 1907,
S. Rickenbaugh; 1908, G. D. Dunham; 1909, Wm. Hammer.
The Woman’s Relief Corps was organized soon after the post, probably
in 1884, and has always been a helpful auxiliary to the post. A few years
later was formed the Ladies of the Grand Army, another society which is
made up of women who are either wives, sisters or daughters of Grand Army
men. This society is styled the Ladies’ Circle of the Grand Army of the
Republic.
There are the Daughters of Veterans, also the Spanish-American War
Camp, all of which semi-military societies are well organized at this date.
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CHAPTER XV.
BENCH AND BAR.
[This chapter has been largely taken, by permission, from Ben Douglas’ “ Wayne
County Lawyers," published in 1900.]
The bench and bar of Wayne county have a proud record of achieve-
ment and their history is of more than ordinary interest. The roll contains
the names of distinguished statesmen, generals, jurists, authors and lawyers,
who have won both state and national fame.
The Wayne county bar for ability and integrity has always stood high
in the estimation of the bar of tht state. This bar has the reputation of
sticking closely to forms of practice, and making hard fights on close points
of law, which is often a surprise to lawyers from other counties, who have
been accustomed to loose practice.
The stress of the profession of law is very great. On the bench or in
the ranks the law is an absorbing pursuit, and is characterized by situations
that engage the whole man. The relations of lawyers to each other is pro-
fessionally that of opponents. They stand against each other; they contend;
and yet it is creditable to the influence of the study and pursuit of the law
that these contentions do not reach the heart or become a part of the life.
There is, perhaps, no one of the learned professions more characterized by
liberality and kindliness of thought among its members than that of the law.
The attorneys and judges of this community have always taken a con-
spicuous part in moulding public opinion. Their business brings them con-
stantly in the “limelight.” Their forum is the whole community, while other
professions are confined to a small proportion of the entire people. There-
fore the members of the legal profession wield, perhaps, a greater influence
over the life and destiny of the community as a whole than any other class
of men.
The memories of the lawyers of the earlier decades of the history of
Wayne county are perhaps less striking, familiar and interesting than those
of the later years. The daily glow of natural sunlight is regarded as a mat-
ter of course, and less memorable than the shadow which settles down in the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
days of eclipse. For a similar reason the years of generations gone are less
vivid in our recollection than the more recent and later ones.
JUDGES OF COMMON PLEAS.
Judges of the courts of common pleas who have presided in judicial
districts of which Wayne county constituted a part, from 1812, were as
follows :
Benjamin Ruggles, William Wilson, George Tod, Alexander Harper,
Ezra Dean. Jacob Parker, Levi Cox, Martin Welker, William Sample, Joseph
H. Downing, William Given, William Reed, Charles C. Parsons, Carolus F.
Voorhis, Wellington Stilwell, John D. Nicholas, Edward S. Dowell, John T.
Maxwell, Frank Taggart, Celsus Pomerene, Samuel B. Eason.
Common pleas judges holding court in Wooster until the period of Hon.
Ezra Dean : Ruggles, Wilson, Tod and Harper.
Benjamin Ruggles was born in Connecticut. After his admission to the
bar he removed to Ohio, and later became prominent in the United States
Senate, serving from this state from 1815 to 1833. He held court in Wooster
as early as 1812.
William Wilson was a native of New Hampshire, emigrating to Ohio
about the time of the admission of the state into the Union. He appears
among the president judges of the court of common pleas in 1803, 1810,
1820, holding court in Wooster in 1816. He served two terms in Congress.
George Tod was the father of David Tod. Judge Tod was from Trum-
bull county, Ohio, represented the district of which that county formed a
part in the Ohio Senate in the early history of the state, was a member of
the supreme court of Ohio during the first decade of his history, and as
president of the court of common pleas held court in Wooster in 1816.
Alexander Harper was a native of Ireland, immigrated to the United
States, settled in Ohio, served in the earlier sessions of the General Assembly,
was a member of Congress, was elected to the judgship, and held court in
Wooster as early as 1822.
CIRCUIT JUDGES, FIFTH DISTRICT.
Circuit judges from the fifth district, Ohio, elected in November, 1884,
under an act of the General Assembly of April 14, 1884, establishing said
court, three judges being elected, the respective periods each was to serve
to be determined by lot, resulting as follows :
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289
John W. Albaugh, for two years, re-elected, for six years; Charles Fol-
lett, for four years, re-elected, for six years; John A. Jenner, for six years,
re-elected for six years. Albaugh dropping out in 1892, J. C. Pomerene was
elected for six years, in 1892, but dying in December, 1897, M. L. Smyser
was appointed by Governor Bushnell to succeed him, serving from January
15, 1898, until November, of that year. John M. Swartz, in November,
1898, was elected to fill the residue of the term, serving from November 17,
1898, to February 9, 1899. In 1898, R. M. Voorhis was elected for the full
term. In 1894, John J. Adams was elected for six years. In September,
1895, John A. Jenner resigned, and George E. Baldwin was appointed by
the Governor, and served until in November of that year. In 1895 Charles
H. Kibler was elected to fill the unexpired time, occasioned by the resignation
of Jenner. In 1896 Silas M. Douglass was elected for six years.
EARLY PROSECUTING ATTORNEYS.
The following lawyers were prosecuting attorneys of Wayne county
from 1812 to 1819, or to the period of Judge Edward Avery: Roswell M.
Mason, 1812; Nathaniel Mather, 1814; J. W. Halleck, 1815; Alexander Har-
per, 1816; William B. Raymond, 1817; H. Curtis, 1818.
LAWYERS OF l8l2.
But little is known, or of record, relative to a majority of the lawyers
who were in attendance at the first session of the court of common pleas held
in Wooster, August 6, 1812, Hon. Benjamin Ruggles presiding, with Chris-
tian Smith, David Kimpton and John Cisna as associate judges. We give
the names of the lawyers who were present: Roswell M. Mason, C. R.
Sherman, J. W. Lathrop, Nathaniel Mather, John M. Goodenowr, John C.
Wright, William B. Raymond, Elderling Potter.
Jacob Parker was a great lawyer and a great judge. He served on the
common pleas bench under the old constitution, when his circuit included the
counties of Knox, Richland, Holmes, Medina and Wayne. He was born
in New England and was the brother-in-law of Judge Charles R. Sherman,
who was a justice of the supreme court of Ohio, and three of w^hose sons are
famous in the annals of Ohio, the Judge, the General and the Senator. He
w'as president judge of the eleventh circuit, and sat in Wooster in *1841 and
1842.
( 19)
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Among the prominent men who were principally lawyers, whose births
occurred, and whose earlier, and even later years, were spent in Wayne
county, or within a radius of twenty-five miles of Wooster, this territory
then being in Wayne county, we may mention the name of Hon. William
B. Allison, of Dubuque, Iowa, who was born in Wayne county, in 1829,
before the formation of Ashland county in 1846. He studied law in Wooster,
and removed to Iowa in 1857, has served four terms in Congress, was elected
to the United States Senate, taking his seat March 4th, 1873, an^ retained
his place in that honorable body over a quarter of a century.
William L. Strong, ex-mayor of New York city, went to Wooster in
May, 1845, an<3 was employed by the firm of Lake & Jones, the largest re-
tailing dry goods house in Wooster, and remained in their employ until the
first of January, 1847. He removed to the city of New York in 1857, and
at the end of forty years had risen to the rank of one of the merchant princes
of that city.
Thomas W. Bartley also figured in the courts of Wooster. He became
Governor of Ohio.
Charles R. Sherman is on record as among the first lawyers, with
J. W. Lathrop, William C. Raymond, John C. Wright, John M. Goodenow,
Roswell M. Mason, Nathaniel Maher and Elderling Potter, in attendance at
the court, in Wooster, at the October term, 1813. He was the father of
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Judge Charles T. Sherman, and Hon.
John Sherman of Washington, D. C., who in the earlier time appeared in
trial of causes at the Wooster bar.
Rufus P. Ranney was recognized by the lawyers of Wayne county,
where professional duties occasionally called him, as a man of superior legal
talent.
Rufus P. Spalding and David K. Carter quite frequently were interested
in legal contentions in the Wayne county court, both having been in Con-
gress and both lawyers and jurists of wider than state reputations.
Col. Enoch Totten \vas a son of our late respected pioneer fellow-citizen,
Michael Totten, and was born in Wayne county. He won a national reputa-
tion as a lawyer.
Samuel H. Kauffmann, formerly of near Millbrook, Wayne county,
reared in that neighborhood, and yet remembered by some of our citizens,
possesses the distinction of being one of the owners and editors of the Wash-
ington (D. C.) Star , a great metropolitan daily.
John Sloane in his day was a distinguished citizen of Ohio, and an honor
to Wayne county, to which he removed soon after the admission of the state
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29I
into the Union. He was a member of the Ohio Legislature as early as 1804.
In 1807 President Jefferson appointed him receiver of public moneys of the
new land office at Canton, Ohio. He served ten years in Congress, from
1819 to 1829. In 1841 the Legislature of Ohio appointed him secretary of
state for three years. He held the office of treasurer of the United States,
by appointment of President Fillmore, dying in 1856.
Major-General David Sloane Stanley is a growth of Chester township,
Wayne county, Ohio, of over seventy years ago. He was reared and edu-
cated by the late Doctor Leander Firestone, of Wooster. He graduated
from West Point in 1852. In 1861 he was appointed captain in the Fourth
United States Cavalry. He was made brigadier-general of volunteers, in
1861, and soon rose to the rank of major-general.
Hon. Patrick A. Collins, a native of county Cork, Ireland, ex-mayor of
Boston, and twice elected to Congress, lived for a time in Wayne county,
acting in the capacity of coal miner.
Thomas Corwin lent his fascinations to the old court house in Wooster,
and in the early days was a noted orator.
Wooster and Wayne county have had the following representatives in
Congress: Reasin Beall, John Sloane, Benjamin Jones, Ezra Dean, George
Bliss, Martin Welker, A. S. McClure, M. L. Smyser, and Lewis P. Ohliger.
The last-named four gentlemen all resided in Wooster, and with the excep-
tion of Hon. Martin Welker, all vigorously and successfully engaged in their
respective pursuits, two of them swordsmen of the law.
John K. Co wen, of Baltimore, Maryland, formerly lived in Wayne
county. He has been congressman and president of the Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad company.
Rush Taggart, of New York, is a brother of Judge Frank Taggart of
Wooster, and was born in Smithville, Wayne county, Ohio. He completed
his collegiate course at the University of Wooster, a member of a class of
six, who were the first graduates of the institution. After this he taught
for a year in the Wooster high school, when he entered the law' department
at Ann Arbor, from which he also graduated. He commenced the practice
of law in Wooster.
Gen. Samuel R. Curtis was a Wooster lawyer, with a record of states-
man, patriot and soldier, and shed lustre on the American army in two of his
country’s wars.
John Bruce points to Plain township, Wayne county, as his old home.
He is of the Scotch clan of Bruces, of Bannockburn. His parents immigrated
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to the United States and settled in Wayne county in 1840. He was a sol-
dier in the Civil war from Iowa, rose to the rank of general, and became a
prominent lawyer in Keokuk, Iowa.
Hon. Martin Welker was lieutenant-governor of Ohio, with Chase as
governor, a patriotic and prudent legislator in Congress, judge of common
pleas and United States courts, a doctor of laws and for years lecturer on
international and constitutional law in Wooster University.
PRESENT-DAY WAYNE COUNTY LAWYERS.
Lyman R. Critchfield was bom in Knox county, Ohio, May 22, 1831,
and is a son of the late Reuben T. Critchfield, of Millersburg, Holmes county,
Ohio. He was graduated from the Ohio Wesleyan University at Delaware,
Ohia, in June, 1852. Soon thereafter he commenced the study of law, in
Columbus, Ohio, with Hon. George E. Pugh, then attorney-general of the
state, and after this, a United States senator from Ohio. He was admitted
to practice in March, 1853, and the following year he spent in the Queen
City, in the office of the clerk of the superior court. He opened an office in
Millersburg, Holmes county, Ohio, where he rapidly grew into practice and
became a conspicuous member of the bar. He has served as prosecuting
attorney of Holmes county, and was a member of the senate in the General
Assembly of Ohio. He was attorney-general of Ohio, in 1863-4, and dis-
charged his duties in a manner satisfactory to his constituents and the state.
As one of the leaders and foremost thinkers and orators of the Democratic
party, he has fought congressional battles. On two occasions nominated for
the supreme judgeship of Ohio on the Democratic ticket, in each instance he
made a vigorous and animated canvass, and with a splendid running record
shared in the disasters of his party in the state.
Hon. Addison S. McClure was bom in Wooster, Wayne county, Ohio,
October 10, 1839. He received a common school education in Wooster.
In the fall of 1853 he entered Jefferson College, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania,
where he remained five years, taking the honor for oration in the annual
literary contest. In 1859 he left college and went to the South as a teacher,
and found employment near Natchez. Mississippi, where, for a time, he re-
mained, when he returned to Wooster, in April, i860. He immediately
entered the law office of Messrs. Cox & Welker, where he completed his ele-
mentary studies, and was admitted to the bar of Ohio, in March, 1861. April
16, 1861, he enlisted in Company E, Fourth Regiment Ohio Volunteer In-
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293
fantry, to serve for three months, re-enlisting* in the same company and regi-
ment for three years at Camp Dennison, Ohio, June 4, 1861. In October,
of the same year, he was transferred to the Sixteenth Regiment Ohio Volun-
teer Infantry, then being organized at Camp Tiffin, Wooster, Ohio, recruit-
ing Company H of this regiment, having been commissioned captain of the
same. After the close of the war he resumed the practice of law in Wooster.
He was elected recorder of the then village of Wooster, in April, 1867, and
was appointed postmaster of this city in May, 1867, serving for twelve years.
He became one of the proprietors of the Wooster Republican in August,
1870, assuming the editorial management and direction of that paper, which
continued until 1881. He was a member of the Republican national conven-
tion, held in Chicago in 1868, which nominated General Grant for the
presidency, and of a similar convention, held in Cincinnati, in 1876, which
nominated Rutherford B. Hayes. He was elected to Congress in 1880, was
unanimously renominated in 1882, and was defeated. In 1894 he was again
elected to the federal House of Representatives. He ran eighteen hundred
ahead of the state ticket, carrying Wayne county by the unprecedented major-
ity of nine hundred and ten. He was renominated in 1896, and was defeated
He was married September 26, 1866. to Mary L. Brigham, of Vienna, Mich-
igan. Their only child, Walter C. McClure, was born in August, 1880.
Judge Martin Welker was born in Knox county, Ohio, April 25, 1819;
his early life was of obscure and modest origin. At the age of fourteen
he held a clerkship in a store in the neighborhood. Four years later, at
Millersburg, Holmes county, Ohio, he commenced his researches of the
law, and at twenty-one was admitted to practice. He Was appointed clerk
of the common pleas court in Holmes county, serving five years. The Whigs
nominated him for Congress in 1848, but he was defeated. He was elected
common pleas judge of the sixth district of Ohio, and served five years, under
the new constitution of 1851. He was nominated for lieutenant-governor in
1859, upon the ticket with Salmon P. Chase, and was elected, but refused
a second nomination. During the Civil war he was a gallant defender of
the Union cause; he was appointed major on the staff of Gen. J. D. Cox,
and served with the three months’ enlisted recruits, subsequently acting as
aide-de-camp to the Governor, and as judge-advocate- general of the state,
until the expiration of the term of Governor William Denison. He superin-
tended the Ohio drafts in 1862 in the capacity of assistant adjutant-general
of Ohio. While in the military service he was nominated by the Republi-
cans for Congress, but was defeated. He was nominated again in 1864,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
this time being successful, re-elected in 1866 and 1868. President Grant in
1873 appointed him district judge of the United States for the northern dis-
trict of Ohio.
Judge Martin L. Smyser was born in Chester township. Wayne
county, April 3, 1851, on a farm, where he was reared. He remained on the
paternal homestead with his father. Emanuel Smyser, a native of York
county, Pennsylvania, who removed to Wavne county in 1832, when he
registered as a student at Wittenburg College, Springfield, Ohio, from which
institution he graduated in 1870. He soon thereafter commenced the study
of law in Wooster in the office of Hon. L. R. Critchfield. He passed his
legal examination at Columbus, Ohio, in April, 1872, opening an office at
once in Wooster. He \vas nominated during the fall of that year for prose-
cuting attorney of Wayne county, by the Republicans, having then but passed
his twenty-first year. In 1873 he entered into professional relations with
Hon. A. S. McClure, which partnership continued for much more than a
quarter of a century. To the Republican national convention at Chicago in
1884 he was chosen as an alternate delegate, and in 1888 he was sent as a
regular delegate, and during this year he was elected to Congress. He
was appointed to the bench of the circuit court, January 15, 1898, by
Governor Asa S. Bushnell, to fill the vacancy occasioned by the death of
Judge Julius C. Pomerene.
Eugene W. Newkirk was born in Clinton township, Wayne county,
Ohio, is a son of Isaac Newkirk, who died in December, 1870, and a grand-
son of Henry Newkirk, a native of Washington county, Pennsylvania, he
being a son of Isaac Newkirk, who was a soldier under General Crawford,
in the disastrous military campaign against the Indians of Sandusky, Ohio,
in 1782. Isaac Newkirk, the father of Wade N., was a successful farmer.
The son graduated from the University of Wooster in 1882. and from the
Law College in Cincinnati in 1885, and then opened an office in Wooster.
Samuel B. Eason was born at the old Eason homestead in Springville,
Plain township, Wayne county, Ohio, April 2, 1844, and 1S a son °f the
Hon. Benjamin Eason, of Wooster, the oldest member in active practice at
the Wooster bar. The son enlisted in the Federal army May 27, 1862, and
served three months. Then he studied at Mt. Union, Ohio, Vermilion In-
stitute, Hayesville, Ohio, and the law department of the University of Mich-
igan, graduating in 1869. He has practiced about thirty-five years in Woos-
ter. '• rs appointed to a judgeship, and lie is something of an astronomer.
Thomas B. Keeler was born in the village of Congress, Congress town-
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295
ship, Wayne county, October 14, 1849, at which place he lived until April,
1876, when he removed to West Salem. He first engaged in the tanning
business and then at the carpenter’s trade with his father, John Keeler, who
married to Hannah Matthews, of Wooster, a sister of Mrs. Sarah Kuffel,
a daughter of the famous Adam Poe, the Indian fighter. He received a
good education and taught school until he removed to West Salem. During
the time he was teaching, he commenced the study of law at Wooster. He
was admitted to the bar in Wooster in 1874, but did not enter upon practice
until 1876. He Was married in 1874 to Ida Wiltmer, and has two children,
John V7., his son, and a daughter, Ida. He has been engaged in the practice
of his profession at West Salem.
Lyman R. Critchfield, Jr., was born in Millersburg, Holmes county,
Ohio, and is a son of Hon. Lyman R. Critchfield. His primary education
was received in the schools of his native town, which was supplemented
by a college course at the Ohio Wesleyan University at Delaware, Ohio.
After the termination of his studies at this institution he returned to Millers-
burg, entered the office of his father, and there completed the elementary
work of preparation for the professional practice. He passed the state exam-
ination at Columbus, Ohio, for admission to the bar June 4, 1891. In
politics he is a Democrat, and on that ticket in April, 1899, he was elected
to the office of city solicitor of the city of Wooster. He was married
September 28, 1898, to Rose, daughter of Allen Brown, of Salt Creek town-
ship. When the war between the United States and Spain was declared
he enlisted as a private in Company D, Eighth Regiment Ohio Volunteer In-
fantry.
Asbury Durbin Metz was born in Wooster, Wayne county, Ohio, July
24, 1852. He was a son of Jacob Metz, in the earliest history of Wooster
and when it was a village, and for years afterwards a boot and shoe mer-
chant. The son was graduated from the University of Wooster in 1874. He
studied law and has practiced in Wooster.
Price Russell was born on a farm in Medina county, Ohio. In 1865,
when he was ten years old, with his parents he came to Creston, Wayne
county, where he continued to live. He passed through the common schools,
and the Ohio University, then studied law for one year with Hon. Lyman R.
Critchfield. at Millersburg, Ohio; then graduated from the Cincinnati Law
College in 1890. He engaged in newspaper work for some time, owning the
Medina Standard ; then began practicing law in Creston, Wayne county.
Lorenzo D. Cornell of Shreve, Clinton township, Wayne county, was
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born in Chester township, November 26, 1854. He was educated at the
business college of Valparaiso, Indiana. He was editor and manager of a
weekly journal published at Shreve. He read law in the office of McClure &
Smyser of Wooster and was admitted to the bar about 1899. He has an
office in Shreve and is engaged in the law and insurance.
Charles M. Yocum was born in Plain township, Wayne county, Febru-
ary 17, 1842, the son of Joseph G. Yocum, a farmer in that vicinity for over
a half century. The son graduated from the Vermilion Institute in 1866.
He had a short military service in Company D, One Hundred and Sixty-
sixth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, in 1864. He was admitted to
the bar in 1868. On December 25, 1872, he married Isabella A. Ross, of
Wooster. For many years he has practiced law in Wooster.
D. Wenger was born March 22, 1864, in Sugar Creek township,
Wayne county, Ohio. His parents were Pennsylvania Dutch. They removed
to Ohio about fifty-five years ago, and settled on the farm where Mr. Wen-
ger was born. His early days were occupied on the farm, where he re-
mained until he was eighteen years old, when he entered mercantile life, in
which he is at present engaged. He began the study of law in the spring
of 1893 and was admitted to the bar in March, 1896. He studied under the
Sprague correspondence system.
Harry R. Smith, son of Richard H. Smith, received a common school
education and studied law, opening an office in Wooster. He is attorney for
the Camp system of railroads, having assumed general management of the
Ashland & Wooster Railway April 15, 1899.
James B. Meech was born in Chippewa township. Wayne county, and
he has been engaged in the practice of law for over thirty years in this
county. He is a Republican.
William C. Yost was born July 5, 1854, in Congress township. Wayne
county, Ohio, and spent his earlier years on his father’s farm. At the age
of sixteen he entered the Smithvitle high school, which he attended for two
years, when he commenced the study of law, and graduated at Ann Arbor
University, Michigan, in the class of 1884. Soon thereafter he came to
Wooster, opened an office and began the practice of his profession, in which
he is at present engaged. He was elected mayor of the city of Wooster, in
1889, and re-elected to the same position in 1891; he was elected city
solicitor of the city of Wooster in 1893 and re-elected in 1895. He was
largely instrumental in organizing the Wooster Shale Brick works, also in
locating the preserving works in Wooster, of which he is one of the board
of managers.
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John S. Adair was born May 26, 1859, the son of Anderson and Hen-
rietta (McClure) Adair. He was reared on a farm in Wooster township.
He studied six years at the University of Wooster, began studying law in
1881, moved to Kansas in 1886 and began practicing law, returning to
Wayne county in 1888; elected city solicitor of Wooster the following year.
George W. Miller was born in Wayne township, Wayne county, No-
vember 22, 1857. His parents came from Pennsylvania. In 1870 he began
learning the carriage-making trade, and served a three-years apprenticeship
and worked in many different cities at this trade for ten years. In 1880 he
entered school, graduated from a normal and began teaching; in 1890 he
entered the Cincinnati Law School, graduating in 1891, then lived in Chip-
pewa township until 1895, farming, serving two terms as justice of the
peace. He still farms and practices law.
M. L. Spooner is a native of the Queen City, Ohio, where he was
born October 22, 1852, and is a son of Hon. Thomas Spooner, who, as a
member from Ohio of the Republican national convention in i860 assisted
in the nomination of Abraham Lincoln for the presidency, and who, in the
fifties, was president of the national organization of the American party.
At the age of sixteen he entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy,
New York. In 1869 he was engaged upon the survey and construction of
the Kansas Pacific railway, and in the winter of 1869-70 he became a mem-
ber of Troop E, Seventh United States Cavalry, then stationed at Ft. Wallace,
Kansas, in which he served for a year, guarding the line of the road against
the attacks of hostile Indian. He then located at Humboldt, Kansas, where
he learned the trade of printer in the office of the Humboldt Union. In
1872-73 he was engaged in the government survey of what is now Oklahoma.
In 1875 he returned to Cincinnati, where he resumed the craft of printer,
having been foreman in a number of the large printing establishments of
Wooster, whither he came in 1881, taking charge of the Wayne County
Herald. From 1884 he engaged principally in examining and abstracting
titles. He became a member of the Ohio bar in 1897.
Edgar E. Stone is a resident of Milton township, spent his earlier years
on his father’s farm, was a student at the University of Wooster for a
term, also at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was admitted to the bar about 1888.
He is not, we believe, actively engaged in practice, and lives on his farm
near Sterling, Wayne county.
Warren Ramsey, a son of Warren Ramsey, is a native of Wayne county,
and remained with his father on the farm until he was sixteen years of age,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
when he attended the Smithville Academy, Wayne county. He graduated
from the University of Wooster in 1887, was admitted to the bar and opened
an office in Orrville, where he continued in the practice.
Edward Maag was born in Mt. Eaton, Paint township, Wayne county,
about forty years ago. He is a man of good education, and was a teacher
for a number of years. He studied law and was admitted to the bar.
Thomas W. Peckinpaugh was born in Pennsylvania, November 17, 1817.
On his father’s side he is of German extraction, on the mother’s English.
In 1821 his parents emigrated to Green township, when the subject of this
sketch \vas but four years of age. His father was a farmer, and with him
his son remained until he was tw’enty-one. He studied law in Wooster and
was admitted to the bar in 1848. On October 18th of that year he married
Jane E. Cotton, then began practice in Chippewa township. He filled sev-
eral local offices and two terms in the Legislature.
Eugene Carlin, son of George Carlin, a prominent physician of West
Salem, Wayne county, is a graduate of the high school of that village and
the law school at Ada, Ohio, and has been practicing many years.
D. T. Downing was born in Wooster township, July 17, 1849. After
attendance upon the public schools in Wooster, he took a classical course
at Denison University, Granville, Ohio. He was admitted to the bar in 1877.
He opened a la\v office in Wooster, but after a few years retired from practice.
George A. Starn was born in Wayne county, February 20, 1874, and
was reared on a farm, upon which he remained and worked until he was
eighteen years of age. He was a student at the University of Wooster
and is a graduate of the law department of Ada Institute, Ada, Ohio, and
was admitted to the bar in 1899. He is located in practice in Orrville.
John C. Morr was born in Holmes county, Ohio, July 18, 1850. His
father was a farmer, and the son worked on the farm until he was seventeen
years of age, then began plastering and stone cutting, continuing until the
spring of 1880. May 5, 1880, Mr. Morr was admitted to the bar by the su-
preme court and has since been practicing his profession in Wooster.
Benton G. Hay was born in Ashland county, Ohio, February 18, 1874.
He was reared and worked upon the farm until he was eighteen years of
age, when he began a course of study, taking the law course at the Ada
Normal Institute. He v as admitted to the bar. Columbus, Ohio, in March.
1898, and during the fall of that year opened an office in Wooster.
Joseph Gallagher, of Smithville, v as born January 12, i860, in Wayne
township, Wayne county. He is a son of Victor Gallagher of that commu-
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299
nity, his mother, Elizabeth Lehman, being a daughter of David Lehman, de-
ceased. He was admitted to the bar in 1898, at Columbus, Ohio. He hoisted
his legal gonfalon in Smithville.
John R. McKinney was born in Washington county, Pennsylvania, No-
vember 12, 1843, his parents removing to Wayne county, Ohio, in 1847.
His father was a native of Washington county, Pennsylvania; his mother
of Scotch birth, her parents immigrating to the United States when she was
young. The family settled near Dalton, in Sugar Creek township, where they
remained until 1867, when he transferred his domicil to Wooster. His son
worked on the farm until his seventeenth year, when he went to the Ontario
Academy, Richland county, Ohio, where he studied for two years. August
22, 1862, he joined the One Hundred and Twentieth Regiment, Ohio Vol-
unteer Infantry. After his return from the army he attended Vermilion
Institute, Hayesville, Ohio, for one year; then taught school, then he came
to Wooster. In June, 1875, he was admitted to the bar here. He was three
times elected justice of the peace on the Republican ticket. He is now
located in Wooster.
Ed S. Weitz is one of the latest recruits to the Wayne county bar, and
since establishing himself in Wooster he has won a very creditable standing
in his profession.
Alfred J. Thomas was born in Paris, Stark county, Ohio, and is the
son of a mechanic. At an early age he went to Salem, Ohio, and entered a
machine shop. From there he removed to Wooster, in 1859, and became an
employe with the old firm of McDonald. Laughlin & Co., with which he
remained for a number of years. He read law with the late Hon. William
M. Orr, of Orrville, was admitted to the bar, opened an office in Wooster,
and continued in the practice here.
Reno H. Critchfield was born in Ripley township. Holmes county, Ohio,
September 22, 1865. He was reared on a farm and his earlier years were
spent in labor upon it. In 1886 he made a tour of the Pacific coast, for
sixteen months remained there, when he returned to Ohio. He then reg-
istered as a student at the Ohio Normal University, a learner in summer,
a teacher in winter, and this he continued for twelve years. The last three
years of his school life were exclusively spent in studying law, and on the
completion of this course of research in the law college he entered an office
in Millersburg, Holmes county, Ohio, where he remained until March, 1899,
when he was admitted to the bar. He then located at Shreve, Wayne county.
Hervey H. Hubbell was born in Scotch Ridge, Wood county, Ohio,
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November 4, 1873, ls a son °f Rev. S. C. Hubbell, long a resident of Wooster
while a retired minister of the United Presbyterian church. Hervey H. is a
graduate of the Wooster high school, class of 1891, and a graduate of the
University of Wooster, class of 1895; was admitted to the bar in June, 1897.
Silas N. Coe was born in Sugar Creek township, Wayne county, Ohio,
in June, 1837. His father was a farmer and mill owner, and he remained
in his sendee until the death of the father in 1854. He served for some time
as a private in the Sixteenth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, enlisting
in 1861, and was ranked as sergeant-major. He Was admitted to the bar in
1874, and opened an office in Orrville. He served as United States commis-
sioner. He was married February 14, 1877, to Ellen Steele.
Aquila Wiley was born in Cumberland county, Pennsylvania. His fa-
ther, William Wiley, was a farmer. In 1852 he came to Wayne county,
Ohio, with his father, who purchased land and settled a short distance
northeast of Reedsburg. Although quite a young man, his education was
sufficient to qualify him for the duties of teaching, and for several years
he successfully engaged in this vocation. He read law in Wooster, and
was admitted to the Ohio bar in June. 1857. He was married May 19,
1876, to Emma, daughter of Hon. Neal Power, a former dry goods merchant
of Wooster. Mr. Wiley entered the Union army in 1861, and by a series
of promotions became brigadier-general in 1865. He was prominent in
politics, Was elected probate judge of Wayne county in 1876, elected to Ohio
Legislature in 1897.
James E. Snyder was born near Burbank, Congress township, Wayne
county. January 14, 1869, and is a farmers son. He studied law, graduated
from the University of Wooster in 1893, winning a reputation as an orator;
graduated from the Ohio State University in 1895, admitted to the bar
that year.
Charles C. Jones is the only son of ex-State Senator Lake F. Jones and
Jennie Jones, of Wooster, and was born in Mt. Vernon. Ohio, October
22, 1873. He is a great-grandson of Hon. Benjamin Jones, who settled in
Wayne county as early as 1811, who served in both houses of the General
Assembly of Ohio, and two years in Congress. He received his education
in the public schools of Wooster, taking a commercial course at Bixler’s
Business College of this city, later attended the Ohio State University, and
was admitted to the bar in 1900.
Walter J. Mullins is the youngest son of James Mullins of Wooster,
who permanently established himself in this city a number of years ago. He
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301
graduated from the University of Wooster in the class of 1881, subsequently
becoming a student of law, was admitted to the Ohio bar, and for a period
engaged in the practice of his profession in Wooster, later engaging in the
coal business.
Cyrus A. Rider Was born in Wayne county, January 16, 1844. He
enlisted in the Union army in 1862, was wounded at Mission Ridge and mus-
tered out June 13, 1865. He studied at various academies after the war.
was admitted to the bar in 1876 and filled several local offices.
Benjamin Eason was bom in a log cabin in Worcester. May 5, 1822. the
son of a millwright and farmer. He had a hard time securing an education;
went to California in 1850, returned to Wayne county, filled local offices,
elected state senator in 1859 and in 1882; entered the Federal army in 1862,
becoming captain, later colonel. He purchased the Wayne County Democrat
in 1864, opened a law office in 1870.
Other living members of the Wayne county bar whose sketches appear
in the biographical section of this work are, Ross W. Funck, J. O. Fritz,
\Y. F. Kean, John McSweeney, J. C. McClarran. T. W. Orr, Mahlon
Rouch, H. B. Swartz, Frank Taggart, James B. Taylor, W. E. Weygandt
and C. A. Weiser.
FORMER MEMBERS OF WAYNE COUNTY BAR PRACTICING ELSEWHERE.
Frederick J. Mullins, son of James Mullins, was born in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, and came with his parents to Wooster, Ohio; graduated from
the university here, was admitted to the bar and opened an office here;
located later at Salem, Ohio, as attorney for the Pennsylvania lines.
Enos Foreman was born in Baughman township, Wayne county, Au-
gust 9, 1820. and was educated at Wadsworth Academy. He was admitted
to the bar in June, 1847, when he commenced the practice of law in Wooster
in which he continued for a number of years. In August, 1852, he, with
II. C. Johnson, purchased the Wooster Democrat , which, in 1853, they
changed to Wooster Republican , selling the same in 1870. He removed
to Kansas City, Missouri, a number of years ago.
J. C. Christy came to Wooster from Washington county, Pennsylvania,
in the early eighties, where he remained about a year. He had served three
years as a soldier in the Union army. He was a lawyer of average ability.
He removed to Kansas City. Missouri.
Lucius Adams came to Wooster from Pennsylvania in 1868. He was
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a graduate of Jefferson College, and also of the Albany Law School. His
sojourn in Wooster was of short duration, during which time he practiced
law and was local editor of the Wooster Republican. In 1869 he removed
to Rock Island, Illinois, began practice and has twice been elected county
judge.
John F. Maxwell was born in Holmes county, Ohio, May 27, 1835, and
was reared on a farm. He attended the public schools and the Fredericks-
burg Academy. He was admitted to the bar in i860; two years later he
entered the Union army; he was elected common pleas judge in 1896.
W. H. Spence practiced law for a short time about 1888. Abandoning
his office in Wooster, he returned to Columbiana county, whence he came.
Martin George Pauley was born in Wooster in 1862, though reared
in Massillon, Ohio. He was a student of law in Wooster but attended the
Cincinnati Law College, from which he graduated in 1890. He began legal
practice in Wooster, but removed to Massillon where he remained.
William G. Myers was a resident and land owner and lawyer for many
years in Chippewa township, Wayne county. In 1873 he removed to Canal
Fulton, Ohio, where he continued in the practice of his profession. He was
captain of Company G, One Hundred and Twentieth Regiment, Ohio Vol-
unteer Infantry, enlisting in 1862.
Wellington Stillwell studied law in Millersburg, Holmes county, where
he was born in 1859; in 1882 he was elected judge of the common pleas
court of the sixth judicial district.
Ezra W. Miller was born in Wayne county and was reared on a farm.
He read law, and after his admission to the bar opened an office in Wooster.
He removed to Dakota when it was a territory, and under both of President
Cleveland's administrations he was appointed receiver of public moneys in
one of the territorial districts.
D. H. Tvvomey located in Wooster in 1868, where he remained for one
year, during which time he engaged in the practice of his profession. He
was born in the city of New York. He was admitted to the bar in Lafayette,
Indiana. From Wooster he went to Davenport, Iowa, from there to Duluth,
Minnesota, and thence to Salt Lake City, Utah.
Josiah Given was born in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, in 1828,
and in his early life was a farm laborer and blacksmith, and with his par-
ents came to Holmes county, Ohio, where they settled when he was ten
years old. He was a soldier in the Mexican war, was admitted to the bar in
1851 and served two terms as prosecuting attorney of Holmes county. He
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entered the Union army in 1861 with the rank of captain, became colonel
of the Seventy-Fourth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and subsequently
a brigade commander. He served as postmaster of the thirty-ninth congress.
For a short period he practiced law in Wooster and in 1868 he removed to
Des Moines, Iowa, where he has held many important offices.
James R. Woodworth is a native of Paris, Lamar county, Texas, but
when he was six years old his parents removed to New Orleans, Louisiana,
where he was reared and obtained his education. At the outbreak of the
Civil war the family removed to Kansas. He served in and obtained promo-
tion in the Union army. He read law in Kansas City, Missouri, and was
admitted to the bar in 1870, beginning practice in that city. In 1874 he
located in Wooster and was elected mayor of the city in 1887, serving one
term. He subsequently removed to Kansas City.
William Reed descends from a patriotic ancestry. His father, William
Reed, was a product of Adams county, Pennsylvania, and his grandfather,
William Reed, who was of Scotch genealogy, was a soldier in the war of
1812. His son was born in Columbiana county, Ohio, in 1823. He was
admitted to the Ohio bar in 1847 and immediately began the practice of law
in Millersburg, Holmes county, Ohio, where he became common pleas judge
and prosecuting attorney.
A. H. Walkey located in Orrville, Wayne county, Ohio, probably twenty
years ago and began the practice of his profession. He was a politician as
well as lawyer and was the Republican nominee for Congress from this dis-
trict upon one occasion. He went to Denver, Colorado.
Thomas Y. McCray was born in Washington county, Pennsylvania,
August 8, 1837; came to Ohio with his parents in 1845. He was admitted
to the bar in 1862 in Ashland comity. In March, ]866, he moved to West
Salem, Wayne county; held many public offices; later moved to Mansfield,
Ohio.
Ezra V. Dean was born in Wooster about eighty years ago. His father
had been judge of the court of common pleas and had served in Congress
two terms and gave the son a college education, who, when he was admitted
to the bar in 1853, formed a partnership with his father. He served in the
Ohio Legislature from W ayne county from 1854 to 1856. When the One
Hundred and Twentieth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry was organized
he was appointed quartermaster, resigning in the the fall of 1863. In 1865,
with his family, he removed to Ironton, Ohio.
Thomas Johnson was a native of Virginia, bom November 13, 1817.
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He settled in Wooster in the fifties and began practicing law. He was
twice elected probate judge of Wayne county, serving from 1858 to 1864.
After this he was, for a number of years, engaged in the banking business
in Wooster. He removed to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1875, and thence to Kansas
in 1882 and later to Chicago, Illinois.
George W. Ross was born in Milton township, Wayne county, Ohio,
June 8, 1854. He was admitted to the bar March 9, 1879, opening an office
at Sterling, practicing at the Wayne county bar until 1889, when he removed
to Findlay, Ohio.
Linneus Q. Jeffries is a son of the late Hon. John P. Jeffries and was
born in Wooster in 1844, educated at the Wooster schools, read law with his
father and was admitted to the bar June 6, 1866, opening an office that year
at West Salem, Wayne county, practiced law here, later went to South Da-
kota, then Chicago.
Celsus Pomerene, representative of a distinguished family, born in Ber-
lin, Ohio, June 18, 1866, received a generous education, practiced law in
Cleveland and elsewhere.
Henry McCray was born in Washington county, Pennsylvania, his par-
ents removing to Ohio in 1845. He read law in Wooster with his brother,
T. Y. McCray, and was admitted to the bar in this city by the district court
of Ohio July 6, 1868. Here he practiced his profession until March, 1872,
when he removed to Ashland, Ohio, where he served as judge of the common
pleas court.
Wilbert I. Slemmons was born near Creston, Wayne county, September
20, 1861. He is a son of Samuel M. Slemmons, who was born in Milton town-
ship. The son graduated from the University of Wooster in 1884, practiced
law here, then removed to Peoria, Illinois.
Florien Giaugue is the son of Augustus and Sophia (Guillaume) Giaugue,
who were born of good families in the canton of Berne, Switzerland, and
came to Holmes county, Ohio, where Florien was bom, May 11, 1843, the
family moving to Wayne county in 1849. The son was highly educated and
became a prominent lawyer and author.
LAWYERS WHO DIED WHILE MEMBERS OF THE BAR OF WAYNE COUNTY.
Edward Avery, an eminent and distinguished lawyer of his day, was
a native of the state of Connecticut and a graduate of Yale College. He was
one of the legal pioneers of Wayne county, removed to Wooster in 1817,
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where he permanently located and where he lived and practiced his pro-
fession for forty-nine years. He was elected prosecuting attorney of Wayne
county in 1819, and with conceded ability executed the functions of that office
until 1825. He was a member of the Senate of the state of Ohio, serving
from December, 1824, to December, 1826. He served in the capacity of
judge of the supreme court of the state of Ohio.
Levi Cox was emphatically the pioneer of the legal profession and
the printing press in Wooster, Wayne county, to which he removed in 1815,
in which he permanently and continuously lived for forty-seven years. The
introduction of the newspaper press in Wooster is due to his intelligence and
enterprise. In 1817 he established the Ohio Spectator , the first newspaper
ever published in the county. From 1819 to 1833 he was state senator, later,
for five years, was judge of the common pleas court.
William M. Orr was born in Baughman township, Wayne county,
January 7, 1826. He was reared on the farm with his father, Judge Smith
Orr, remaining with him until he was sixteen years old, when he commenced
teaching school. He attended the Dalton and Wadsworth academies, and in
1846 entered Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania, from which
he graduated in 1847. At the annual contest of 1846, between the literary
societies of the college, he took the highest honors in debate and was vale-
dictorian of the class of 1847. He was admitted to practice and opened an
office in Wooster in 1859, where he remained until 1865, when he removed
to Orrville, where he lived until his death, August 19, 1893.
James C. Miller, a native of Washington county, Pennsylvania, moved
to Wayne county, Ohio, in an early day, became prominent as a lawyer,
dying suddenly in 1844, when a young man of about thirty years.
Samuel Hemphill was born in Bedford county, Pennsylvania, in 1817,
and in 1827 he came with his father to Wayne county. He attended college
at Athens, Ohio, and became an excellent scholar. He read law with Judge
Levi Cox of Wooster, with whom he was associated in practice after his
admission to the bar. He died in his thirty-sixth year, February 22, 1853.
Lucas Flattery was born in 1821, on a farm in Fairfield county, Ohio.
His father was an early settler and farmer in that county, from Pennsylvania,
and a man of good education. He served as county surveyor for several
years before he died in 1837. Mr- Flattery moved to Wooster in 1846, where
he resided until his death in 1889, having held many public offices.
John W. Baughman resided in Wooster from 1868 until his death in
1894, his grandfather settling in Wayne county in 1816, Baughman township
( 20)
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being named in his honor. John W. served in the Legislature in 1856 and
1888, held a number of local offices.
Arnold A. Ingram was born in Pennsylvania in 1843 and came to
Wooster in 1866 and studied law here. In 1861 he entered the military
service of the United States. In 1885 he was elected city solicitor of Wooster
on the Republican ticket.
George Bliss was born in Jericho, Vermont, January 1, 1813. He came
to Ohio in 1832 and held some important offices here, including that of con-
gressman. He came to Wooster in 1858 and lived here until his death in
1868. He was a very prominent lawyer.
Daniel C. Martin was born in Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, in
1816 and died at his home in Reedsburg, Plain township, Wayne county, in
May, 1889. He was admitted to the Ohio bar by the district court at
Wooster, Ohio, in April, 1857. His practice was of a local character. He
was a good business man, a most successful collector, aiming to conciliate
misunderstanidngs between neighbors rather than foment litigation. He
was for a number of years justice of the peace of Plain township.
Nelson Ferrell was born in Harrison county, Ohio, in December, 1834.
He read law in Carrollton, Ohio, and was elected mayor of that city. He
removed to Orrville in 1884 and acquired considerable popularity in his
profession and was regarded as a good business lawyer. There were many
pleasant traits to his character, and he aimed to be just and fair in his
dealings with men. His life was suddenly terminated at Orrville several
years ago.
Hamilton Richeson died in Wooster June 19, 1870, in the thirty-seventh
year of his age. He was prosecuting attorney of Wayne county two terms
and he was a Union soldier.
Edward S. Dowell was born in Holmes county, Ohio, in 1847, edu-
cated in Wayne county, admitted to the bar in 1869 and opened an office
in Wooster became prosecuting attorney in 1874 and was re-elected. In 1887
he was elected judge of the common pleas court. He died in 1896.
William Given was born in 1819 in Pennsylvania. In 1838 he removed
with his family to Holmes county, Ohio. He was admitted to the bar in
1843, t*ie same >’ear was elected prosecuting attorney of Holmes county,
1<> vhirh lie was re-elected. In 1840 he was elected to the General Assembly
of Ohio. Tn 1850 he located in Wooster, and in 1858 was elected judge of
the common pleas court. He remained on the bench until 1862, when he
resigned, and in August of that year was commissioned colonel of the One
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Hundred and Second Regiment Volunteer Infantry, serving in the army for
nearly three years. In March, 1865, he was commissioned brigadier-general.
He died in Wooster in October, 1866.
Benjamin F. Eason was born in Plain township, August 3, 1847. He
died August 21, 1895, and was a son of Col. Benjamin Eason of Wooster.
He was admitted to the Wayne county bar in 1873 an<3 a^so held local offices.
He was about fifty years old when he died.
Joseph H. Carr was born in Wayne county, in 1842, and was educated at
the public schools of Wooster. He commenced studying law in 1859 and
afterwards was admitted to the bar. He entered the Union army in 1861
and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He practiced law in Wooster and
held public offices. He died in 1898.
Ohio F. Jones was bom in Wooster in 1822 and Was a son of Benjamin
Jones, at one time a member of Congress. He studied law and was admitted
to practice in 1846. Until the time of his death, 1882, he continued in the
prosecution of his professional duties.
William S. Peppard was bom in Salt Creek township, Wayne county,
in 1829. He read law in Steubenville, Ohio, with Edwin M. Stanton,
Lincoln’s war secretary, and was admitted to the bar in 1853. He began the
practice of law at Cadiz, Harrison county, Ohio, but subsequently located in
Fredericksburg. Wayne county, where he continued in practice until his death,
July I, 1889.
Wilson S. Orr was born December 28, 1846, in Canaan township,
Wayne county, and died at Wooster, Ohio, September 1, 1888. He was ad-
mitted to practice by the supreme court at Columbus in 1874, and immedi-
ately thereafter entered upon the work of the law in Wooster, where he con-
tinued in practice until the time of his death.
John K. McBride’s father came from Pennsylvania in 1813 when John
K. was three years old and located in Wayne county. He became probate
judge and a noted lawyer.
George Brauneck was born in Prussia in 1813 and came to the United
States in 1835., settling in Wooster in 1843. He studied law under the direc-
tion of George Rex, was admitted to the bar in 1858, and began practice in
Wooster.
Hiram E. Totten was born in Wayne county in 1838. He was a son of
Michael Totten. He was reared upon a farm, but came to Wooster with
his parents in 1858 and was admitted to the bar in 1861, when he opened an
office in Wooster. He joined the Federal ranks, was wounded and died in
Wooster in 1863.
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George Rex was born in Canton, Ohio, July 25, 1817. He removed to
Wooster in 1843 an^ began the practice of law. He was elected and served
for several terms as prosecuting attorney of Wayne county and as a con-
spicuous member of the Ohio Senate. Was appointed judge of the supreme
court in 1874. He died March 27, 1879.
Joseph H. Downing was a native of Belmont county, Ohio, and with
his family removed to Wayne county in 1826. He was one of the most suc-
cessful school teachers in Wayne county. In 1853 he was elected to the Ohio
Legislature. He was admitted to the bar in i860 and opened an office in
Wooster. He became a captain in the Union army, became judge of the
common pleas court and judge of the probate court. He died in 1879.
Eugene Pardee was born in the town of Marcellus, Onondaga county.
New York, in 1814, and died at Wooster, Ohio, on the 14th day of October,
1888. He was elected prosecuting attorney in the fall of 1841, re-elected in
1843, held other offices.
James C. Glasgow was a native of Washington county, Pennsylvania,
where he was born in 1811, and came to Millersburg, Holmes county, Ohio,
with his father about 1824. He removed to Wooster in the early thirties
where he studied medicine and law, although he never practiced medicine.
He practiced law in Wooster until his death in i860.
Solomon R. Bonewitz was a native of Wayne county, Ohio, and was
bom November 28, 1820, and died in his seventy-eighth year. He was
raised on a .farm in Wayne township, working upon it during the summer
months and going to school in winter. In 1844 he removed to Wooster,
studied law and opened an office here in 1845.
Isaac Johnson, the subject of this sketch, was born in Wayne township,
in this county, January 10, 1836. He engaged in the mercantile business in
Wooster, later practiced law until 1881 when he was elected probate judge
and was re-elected in 1884.
James Taylor was a Virginian by birth, born May 10, 1802. Was
admitted to the bar, at Wooster, October 23, 1840, at the age of thirty-eight
years. He died at Fredericksburg, Ohio, July 8, 1873.
John P. Jeffries was born in Huntingdon county, Pennsylvania, July 19,
1815. In 1836 he removed to Wayne county, Ohio, and settled in Wooster.
He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1842. He served four years as prosecut-
ing attorney of Wayne county. In 1858 he was a candidate on the Demo-
cratic ticket from the fourteenth congressional district for a seat in the
House of Representatives, but the district being largely Republican he was
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defeated. He was a delegate to the Democratic national convention at
Charleston. South Carolina, in i860, under instructions to vote for Stephen
A. Douglas for the Presidency. He served one term as probate judge of
Wayne county. Mr. Jeffries, in 1844, commenced collecting facts concern-
ing the primitive peoples of this continent, and continued his research until
1868, when he produced his volume entitled the “Natural History of the
Human Races,” which was published in New York in 1869. He died in
Wooster, August 13, 1888.
Because of his honesty, impartiality and good judgment, none among
the men who have served the state of Ohio in a judicial capacity deserves a
higher place than Charles C. Parsons. He was born near Ithaca, New York,
on September 25, 1819, and while he was still very young his parents
removed to Rochester, in that state, where they lived until 1830. In that
year the family came to Ohio and settled at Medina. He was admitted to the
bar in 1840, practiced at Dalton until 1849 when he removed to Wooster.
Held local offices, including common pleas judge, retiring in 1887 and dying
in 1890.
John McSweeney was born, as best we know, in the town of Black Rock,
Erie county, New York, August 30, 1824. He came to Wooster in 1845 and
began practicing law at once. Was prosecuting attorney in 1852, won great
notoriety as an orator and became one of the leading lawyers of Ohio, his
reputation being national.
LAWYERS WHO WERE MEMBERS OF THE WAYNE COUNTY BAR AND DIED
ELSEWHERE.
George L. Willyard was a native of Knox county, Ohio, born in 1818,
admitted to the bar in 1839 and opened an office in Wooster and died in 1840.
Wyllys Silliman was a state senator as early as 1803. He came to
Wooster in the thirties, and subsequently removed to Cleveland where he
died.
Charles Wolcott practiced law in Dalton and Wooster about 1838, be-
came a representative and a state senator. He died in Oshkosh, Wisconsin,
where he was practicing law.
John A. Holland was in the forties a partner of Gen. Samuel R. Curtis,
had studied law at Mt. Vernon, Knox county, Ohio, and was admitted to the
bar in 1837, later came to Wooster, then moved to Rockport, Illinois, where
he died.
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Hayes Holliday was a member of the Wayne county bar and for a
number of years was a justice of the peace in Wooster township, moved to
Dubuque, Iowa, where he died.
Dennis Winfield Kimber was bom in Wooster, January 30, 1855. He
was admitted to the bar in the fall of 1878. He commenced the practice of
his profession in Wooster, moved to Missouri and died there in 1895.
Samuel R. Curtis practiced law in Wooster for a short time in the
forties, had experience in the Mexican war, became a major-general in the
Civil war, had been in Congress, and was connected with many public national
improvements. He died in 1868.
John H. Harris removed from Canton to Wooster in the thirties and
began practicing law here, removed to Mendota, Illinois, and died there.
Alexander C. McMillan was bom in Wayne county in 1837, admitted
to bar in i860; in 1862 he removed to Pana, Illinois, where he died.
William Sample Was twice elected judge of the common pleas court,
serving from 1857 to 1866. Upon his retirement from the bench he formed
a partnership with the late Hon. John P. Jeffries, of Wooster, and remained
in the practice of his profession in this city for two years when he went
to Newark, Ohio, and thence to Coshocton, Ohio, where he died in 1877.
Lucian H. Upham was born in Vermont in 1808 and came to Wayne
county in 1839, was admitted to the bar in 1843, served one term as auditor
of Wayne county. He removed to Delta, Fulton county, about 1850, where
he died in 1897, he was elected probate judge of Fulton county, in 1854.
In 1856-7 he represented Fulton and Lucas counties in the state Legislature.
James Jeffery was born in Congress township, and Was of Irish ancestry,
his parents immigrating to the United States in 1819, locating the same year
near West Salem, Wayne county. Mr. Jeffery was admitted in 1873. In
1876 he was elected mayor of West Salem. He removed to western Ohio
where he died several years ago.
Henry Lehman was born in Pennsylvania, June 9, 1809. He came to
Wooster about 1833, practiced law and held several local offices, including
probate judge. He died in Atlantic City, New Jersey. March 17, 1897.
William McMillen practiced law principally in the justice courts in the
ante-bellum days. He moved to Iowa and died there.
John McNeil Connell was born in Lancaster, Fairfield county, Ohio,
November 7, 1829, and located in Wooster about 1859, served in the Civil
war, died in Lancaster, Ohio, in April, 1882, after serving in the Ohio state
Senate in 1864.
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William McMahon located in Wooster in the late thirties and began the
practice of his profession, serving as prosecuting attorney of Wayne county
in 1840.
Bryant Grant came to Wooster from New York city about i860, and
practiced law for one year, then returned to New York.
Hugh Wilson was born at Smithville, Wayne county. After his admis-
sion to the bar he opened an office in Orrville, where he remained for a num-
ber of years, afterwards changing his location to New Orleans, Louisiana,
where he died about 1899.
Noah L. Jeffries was admitted to the bar in 1851. He opened an office in
Wooster. After an experience in practice of five years in Wooster, he went
to Millersburg, then to Ravenna, and then to Mansfield, where he entered
the military service of the United States. He died in Washington, D. C\,
about twelve years ago.
Ezra Dean was a native of Columbia county, New York, and had a
Revolutionary ancestry, and served himself as a soldier in the war of 1812.
He located in Wooster in 1824. He became a member of the Ohio Legisla-
ture, judge of the court of common pleas and served in Congress. Later on
removed to Ironton, Ohio, where he died.
George W. Wasson was a son of Joseph Wasson, who was a native of
Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, and who removed to Wayne county, Ohio,
about 1819, practiced law in Wooster, held local offices, moved to Columbus,
Ohio, where he died.
John W. Rankin was a native of Washington county, Pennsylvania, and
in the forties removed to Wayne county, when, for a short period, he taught
school in Wooster, but, probably in 1850, removed to Keokuk, Iowa, which
he made his permanent home, and where he died. He practiced law in
Wooster for several years.
John Elliott Irvine was born in Wooster, Ohio, January 18, 1830.
About 1855 he began practicing law in Wooster. He died in Richmond,
Ohio, in 1869. He was a noted lawyer.
Henry C. Johnson came to Wooster from Wadsworth, Medina county,
Ohio, and practiced law here. For a number of years he was associated
with Enos Foreman in the publication of the Wooster Republican. After
his withdrawal from this paper he removed to Sandusky City, Ohio, where
he published a daily sheet for a time, when he returned to Medina county,
where he died about 1870.
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CHAPTER XVI.
NEWSPAPERS OF WAYNE COUNTY.
By Albert Dix.
Wayne county owes its first newspaper and newspaper press to Judge
Levi Cox, one of the pioneer attorneys of Wooster, who passed away on
the last day of 1862. Judge Cox came to the county from Pennsylvania
and from the east he imported the materials of a journal office: at about the
same time he isued proposals for the publication of a weekly paper in the
village of Wooster to be known as the Ohio Spectator. When he had se-
cured what he considered sufficient support to carry out his plans, he took
into partnership a young man by name, Samuel Baldwin, of Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania. The young partner in the concern was a printer by trade
and thereby greatly aided Mr. Cox, who was unacquainted with the general
work of a printing establishment. The two men began their work with much
enthusiasm and in the summer of 1817 the first edition of the Ohio Spectator
appeared.
The paper was of a medium size, but because of the newness of the
materials and the excellent workmanship the paper made a good appearance.
Politically it was neutral, promoting only what was the best for the welfare
of both the town and the county. A few over three hundred residents were
subscribers, while the advertising maintained an average of two dollars
the week.
The firm only existed one year, when Judge Cox withdrew and was suc-
ceeded by Asa W. W. Hickox, of the Western Reserve. The alliance sur-
vived but one year, when Mr. Hickox disposed of his interests to Mr. Bald-
win, who continued issuing the paper for a time himself. But always weak
physically, the young man within a short time succumbed to the dread dis-
ease, consumption.
Mr. Baldwin’s year was finished out by a relative. Dr. Thomas Town-
send. as manager of the business office, while Joseph Clingan had charge
of the printing. This management continued but a short time, and at the
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end of a year the paper became defunct, and the county was without a pub-
lication, with the exception of a small sheet called The Electioneer , estab-
lished entirely to support personal claims to office in the nearing election
of 1820.
During the period just covered, Mr. Cox, the founder, had held a lien
upon the office, and he resumed the possession of it and soon after issued
proposals for a renewal of the Spectator.
The offer was not well patronized and consequently Mr. Cox sold out
his interests to Benjamin Bentley, a Wooster man, who was desirous of
instituting a paper there. Mr. Bentley not being a practical printer, he se-
cured as a partner Mr. Clingan.
After the issuing and returning of the subscription papers, the Wooster
Spectator appeared as a weekly from the day of January 13, 1820. This
partnership lasted for two years, when Mr. Clingan purchased Mr. Bentley’s
interest. Mr. Clingan conducted the paper for five years himself.
The office again changed hands in the spring of 1826, when Col. John
Barr, of Hagerstown, Maryland, bought it and issued therefrom a paper
entitled the Ohio Oracle , devoted to the support of General Jackson. This
publication lasted for a period of four years and, as one historian of the
county says of it, “It is probable that this pretentious journal, in name at
least, had no prototype and will have no successor/’ Colonel Barr sold his
office after four years to David Sloane, of Wooster, who issued a paper
called The Wooster Journal and Democratic Times. This publication, as
its predecessor, ran for four years, when Mr. Sloane disposed of it to a
brother-in-law, J. W. Schuckers, who published it for the same period.
Both papers were very capably edited, and it was known that the man at the
back of the editorial department, during both papers, was Col. John Sloane,
one of the “most bitter, vituperative, incisive and powerful writers of the
day/’ A Mr. Wharton was the printer.
Mr. Schuckers, in June, 1836. disposed of his interests to Daniel Sprague,
who for a time published the paper under the name of the Wooster Journal
and Democratic Times. After a period of about four years, however, he
changed the name to that of the Wooster Democrat. Mr. Sprague proved
himself a very capable manager for sixteen years, when he sold out to H.
C. Johnson and Enos Foreman. The new managers changed the name of
their publication to the Wooster Republican. After five years Mr. Johnson
retired from the business and moved to Sandusky City. Mr. Foreman con-
tinued the paper, acting as proprietor and manager. On July 25, 1861, Mr.
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Foreman issued a daily from the Republican office, which was continued
until November 30th of the same year. This was the first daily in the county
and was devoted entirely to war news. Mr. Foreman disposed of the office
in August, 1870, his successors being Capt. A. S. McClure and Joseph G.
Sanborn. Horace N. Clemens, who had been the city editor of the paper
under McClure and Sanborn, assumed the controlling interest in the paper,
and, under the firm name of H. N. Clemens & Company, took charge of the
editorial management of the paper and business control. It was while under
the control of Mr. Clemens that the Daily Republican made its first appear-
ance, in June. 1887. George Kettler assumed the city editorship of the Daily
Republican at its start, and has held the position through all the years, there
having been numerous changes in ownership and editorial control, and at
the time this article was written was still acting in the capacity he has always
filled. Mr. Kettler began work as a very young bov. in his early teens, in
the job department, first holding that lowly position, “the printer’s devil,”
but he had his mind set upon higher things and was not content until he
reached the more lofty occupation of writer.
In 1890 Mr. Clemens, with a number of prominent Republicans, incor-
porated the company known as the Wooster Republican Printing Company.
In 1891 Mr. Clemens retired from the management of the paper, hav-
ing disposed of his interests to David W. Solliday, a lawyer, bom in the
county, but who had resided for some years in Texas, and who assumed
the duties of editor. The paper had a precarious existence for some time
and then in 1893 Thomas C. Reynolds, of Akron, an editorial writer and
publisher of much experience, assumed a controlling interest with Francis
C. Whittier, of Akron, as secretary and business manager. In 1898 Albert
Dix, who had been engaged in the newspaper business at Hamilton, Ohio,
with his son, Emmett C. Dix, became interested in the business.
Under the management of the Messrs. Dix, the publication took new life,
with Albert Dix as business manager and Emmett C. Dix in editorial con-
trol and assisting in the local work, with George Kettler in the news depart-
ment. The circulation increased rapidly, especially in 1898, because of the
fine news service during the war with Spain. The Messrs. Dix proved pro-
gressive, with their every thought centered on the best available for the
people whom they serve and consequently have kept pace with the times until
their plant, at the present time, is probably the best piece of newspaper
property owned in any city in Ohio the size of Wooster. The office is
equipped with a Duplex printing press, printing the paper from the roll.
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thus being able to print the constantly growing circulation very rapidly.
Two linotype machines are used in the composing room.
Having now completed the tracing, from origin to the present time, of
one of Wooster's lines of the press, we will now direct our attention to
another.
In the summer of 1862, Joseph Clingan, of whom we have already
spoken, prepared for the publication of another paper in Wooster. It was
in the same year that a German, by name John Sala, established in Wooster
a German paper, known as the Wooster Correspondent ; it, however, had a
very small circulation and existed but a short time.
Mr. Clingan, having completed all his arrangements, in September, 1826,
sent out the first edition of a most excellent publication. The Republican Ad-
vocate. The paper, which had as one of its objects the advancement of
General Jackson to the Presidency, was a complete success, and was well
patronized, continuing for twelve years under the management of the orig-
inal owner, when he sold out to Samuel Littell. Mr. Littell, who was already
owner of the Western Telegraph , established by Martin Barr, combined the
two papers, their politics being the same, and entitled the new sheet The
Democratic Republican. This journal lasted three years, when it was trans-
ferred to James G. Miller and a Mr. Carpenter, a printer; these gentlemen
published it for a year. Isaac X. Hill then leased the office, as had Mr.
Miller from Mr. Littell, and issued for a few years The Democrat. After
the expiration of this lease Mr. Littell sold out to Messrs. Carny and Means,
who published until the death of Mr. Means.
Hon. John Larwill obtained the proprietorship after the death of Mr.
Means and sold the office to Jacob A. Marchand, who continued as owner
of the Democrat up until the time of his death, on August 28, 1862. On
the first of April, 1862, Mr. Marchand had rented the office to Franklin
Harry and John H. Oberly, for the term of one year. His death made it
necessary to sell the Democrat, and Mr. Oberly purchased it, conducting it
for a year with marked ability. In 1864 Mr. Oberly sold out to Col. Benja-
min Eason, who took possession as head of the paper on November 1, 1864.
Mr. Eason sold the office in 1866 to the Hon. John P. Jeffries, who, for a
year, acted as manager, with his son, Linneaus Q. Jeffries, as publisher.
Mr. Jeffries then sold the office to Benjamin Eason and Asa Dimmock. the
former doing a portion of the writing, although especially occupied with the
managerial interests, as Mr. Dimmock was then prosecuting attorney of
Coshocton county.
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In May, 1876, another change was made in which Mr. Eason sold his
interests to Mr. Dimmock, who took into partnership Lemuel Jeffries, under
the firm name of Dimmock & Jeffries. These gentlemen in turn sold it
to James A. Estill, of the Millersburg Farmer , who took possession April
30. 1868. Mr. Estill retired February 25, 1869, and was succeeded by the
Hon. E. B. Eshelman, of the Columbus Statesman , the paper being conducted
by Messrs. Eshelman, Franklin Harry and John J. Lemon. On October 23.
1872, Mr. Lemon sold his interest to John H. Boyd, who. on August 2, 1876.
turned his share over to Thomas E. Peckinpaugh, the firm name then being
known as Eshelman & Company.
Ephraim B. Eshelman, now head of the publication, widely known as
“Old Figgers” because of his propensity for figures in dealing with public
matters when serving in the Ohio Legislature, was perhaps the most widely
known and copied editorial writer the city and county ever knew.
After several years' existence as Eshelman & Company, Mr. Peckinpaugh
sold out his interest to H. P. Gravatt. In July, 1881, Mr. Gravatt became
the owner of Mr. Eshelman’s one-half interest in the firm. Mr. Eshelman
was then for a time editor of the Akron Times , but in 1886 returned to
Wooster and again became a part owner, securing the one-fourth interest
of the late Dr. Leander Firestone, and again assumed the editorial manage-
ment. The firm was now known as H. P. Gravatt & Company.
During all these years, starting in the office when a boy of sixteen
years, Capt. Lemuel Jeffries had been acting as city editor of the paper,
serving in that capacity all the years but those spent as a soldier in the Re-
bellion. Captain Jeffries was a writer of more than average ability, being
exceptionally careful in the preparation of his copy, and was on the pay roll
of the paper at the time of his death, on June 17. 1909. Mr. Eshelman.
because of age, retired from the business May 12, 1902, and died in his
apartment at the Archer House June 6, 1906.
The paper passed into the control of the Wayne County Democrat
Company, a corporation, June 12, 1905, buying the property of H. P. Gra-
vatt, then sole owner. The officers are John C. Hoffman, manager and presi-
dent; Fred H. Zimmerman, secretary and treasurer. The daily issue of the
company, the Wooster Daily Neu’s, made its first appearance July 15, 1905.
The city editor, at the present time. February. 1910, is Edward Hauensein,
a young man who is rapidly developing as a news writer.
The equipment for the Wayne County Democrat and the Daily News is
modern and up-to-date.
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While we have been discussing the growth of Wooster's two most im-
portant publications, we must not neglect to mention those lesser papers that
had their existence contemporary with the Wooster Republican and the
Wayne County Democrat , for without these this history would be incomplete.
While some of these lived but short lives and meant little to the community,
yet others were considered good publications during the years they lived. One
of the first of these was founded by R. V. Kennedy and was called the
Wayne County Standard , a Democratic sheet that did not survive beyond its
first year.
Another was christened the American Eagle. It was established by a
young man of the county, by name Howard Coe. It was to advocate the
interests of the town men then seeking office (1885), but this noble bird
had a woeful flight extending over the short period of but six months.
Among the more successful publications than those just mentioned was
the Wayne County Herald , established in 1878, as a result of a split in the
Republican pary. The paper had a rather hard battle for a number of years
and passed through many changes of ownership and control. The paper
finally became the official organ of the Prohibition party and for a number of
years was a paying newspaper property. This was under the editorial man-
agement as well as the capable business management of John J. Ashenhurst.
Other changes came in the years after Mr. Ashenhurst’s retirement, and
publication was finally suspended during the summer of 1909.
Elsewhere in this review we have made mention of a German publica-
tion in the city that had but a very meager growth and died almost before
its beginning was completed, but we have now another to discuss, the Woos-
ter Journal , the only German paper that ever existed in the county and city.
This publication was established in 1880 by Adolph Weixelbaum and was
printed in the old Quinby building on the southwest side of the square, which
later was torn down and replaced by the building now occupied by the
Annat store.
The paper prospered from the start, the German element giving it
hearty support. During the gas excitement in Findlay in 1886, Mr. Weixel-
baum sold the paper to his brother, Max Weixelbaum, and went to that city,
where he embarked in the same business. His brother conducted the paper
for several years, having the office on South street. For some reason or other,
in later years it did not enjoy its past prosperity and Mr. Weixelbaum went
to Tiffin, where he purchased the old established German paper of Seneca
county. Adolph Weixelbaum, the founder, is now in Lima, where he is
very successful in his ventures in that city.
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The Jacksonian , another of the more successful contemporaries, was a
Democratic newspaper, established and published by J. F. and J. A. March-
and. The first issue appeared in August, 1881. Its mission before the public
was the advocacy of the election of E. S. Dowell to the common pleas judge-
ship, as against C. C. Parsons, who was successful.
The Evening News, the first regular daily paper ever published in the
city, was started by the above gentlemen in February, 1884, and was con-
tinued by them until 1887, when it was taken over by H. N. Clemens, then
publisher of the Republican , who changed its name to the Daily Republican.
The Evening Journal was founded by Calvin D. Myers in 1898, and
after about one year became the property of J. F. Marchand, who continued
the publication until 1906, when it was discontinued. The Jacksonian in 1906
passed into the control of the Wayne County Democrat Company and the
Evening Journal into the hands of the Wooster Republican Printing Com-
pany.
Having thus as concisely as possible endeavored to describe the origin
and growth of the papers of Wooster, the county seat, another subject, that
of the papers of the county at large, remains to be reviewed, and to this
end we now turn. The county is exceptionally well represented with news-
papers, considering the size of the towns therein, and all of these publica-
tions show a marked degree of prosperity.
In the village of Orryille we have two papers, The Crescent and The
Courier, both independent of any political party.
The Orrville Crescent was established in the spring of 1867 by John
A. Wolbach, who while working at his trade in Wadsworth procured a press
and a lot of second-hand material and moved the outfit to Orrville, the trip
being made on a sled. Mr. Wolbach conducted the plant for some years,
when he leased it to Ruth, of Loudon ville, and in the spring of 1879 sold
it to Cherry and Colburn, of Wadsworth. This firm published the paper
but eight months, when they sold out to James A. Hamilton, of Cleveland,
on October 14, 1879. In the intervening years Mr. Hamilton sold the prop-
erty twice, in 1891 to Emerson Brothers, of Indiana, who published the paper
less than a year, after which it was again bought by Mr. Hamilton, who sold
it again in 1900 to Naftzger and Krieble, of Orrville. On repurchasing the
property Mr. Hamilton gave his son. Harry, a third interest, but later pur-
chased the son's interest. In the fall of 1909 the property was placed in
the charge of A. R. Williams and James G. Hamilton, Jr., a son-in-law and
son, who are now conducting the paper.
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In about 1904 the paper was changed from a weekly to a semi-weekly,
and in 1908 was changed to a tri-weeklv. The Crescent has kept pace with
the modern newspaper and is equipped with as fine presses and assortment
of job and newspaper type as any office in the county. In the eighties Mr.
Hamilton purchased a Thorne typesetting machine, it being the first typeset-
ting machine to be brought to Wayne county. In 1901 he ordered a two-
letter Mergenthaler linotype machine, it also being the first one of its char-
acter to be introduced into Wayne county.
When Mr. Hamilton first assumed control of the paper, a five-column
quarto, patent inside, was in use and the circulation was about five hundred.
It was later changed to an eight-column folio and then to a nine-column
folio. When changed to a semi-weekly it was made a seven-column paper
and since being issued as a tri-weekly it has been divided up between a five-
column and six-column folio in size. Since its establishment the Crescent
has had a steady growth until at the present time it is a welcome visitor in
many of the country homes of eastern Wayne county.
The Orrville Courier , although founded in very recent years, has had a
remarkable growth and, aside from upholding only the best for the town,
;1 is one of the best of the many county papers. The management has always
made an effort to secure every item of interest in the county, by no means
limiting it to the town, and thereby making it a publication to be highly
appreciated by the farming community.
The Courier was established in June, 1903, by the Courier Publishing
Company, an established company headed by P. E. Krieble. At its begin-
ning it was edited as an independent paper until, as we have mentioned, it
now stands as one of the foremost of the county's publications.
J. F. Adams, then principal of the high school, was the first editor. The
Courier was first published as a weekly until 1907, when it was made a semi-
weekly, under the editorship of Glenn D. Willaman, and has remained such
up to the present time. In September of 1908 P. E. Krieble assumed the
editorial management and is still acting in that capacity.
The village of Dalton also has in its midst a bright little newspaper, The
Gazette. Walton C. Scott was the founder of this publication. On August
3. 1875, *ie issued one edition called the Dalton Banner, a four-column folio,
in which, in an editorial, was stated that the town and community would be
canvassed and if support enough was subscribed the paper would be enlarged
and publication continued. Consequently, on October 5, 1875, the maiden
number of the Dalton Gazette, a six-column folio, appeared and was pub-
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lishecl as a biweekly for one year, and since that time the Gazette has ap-
peared regularly once a week. The Gazette was edited and published by
the founder, Mr. Scott, for thirty-one years, up until the time of his death,
on December io, 1906. Since that time the Gazette has been published by
his son, E. F. Scott, who assumed charge on the first of December, 1906.
At the present time the Gazette is being published as a six-column quarto.
In Creston, one of the villages of northern Wayne county, there is an-
other independent paper under the management of F. M. Sulliger. Later
than thirty years ago, we regret to say, we can secure no data of this inter-
esting publication, as prior to that time all of the files were destroyed.
At the beginning of the period mentioned C. A. Mellen was the editor
and manager, and at that time the Journal , as the publication is known, was
a very small sheet. The paper remained in the capable management of Mr.
Mellen for about five years, after which he disposed of it to C. A. Stebbins,
now a banker of Creston. After a number of years Mr. Stebbins disposed
of the plant, selling it to Mr. Sulliger, who, as stated, is now at its head.
Mr. Sulliger has owned and managed the paper for the longest time of any
of its owners and has done more to secure its prosperity. The printing de-
partment is equipped with a power press, the only machine of its kind in
the village. Mr. Mellen, the founder, was a most versatile and fluent writer
and, though well advanced in years, continued contributing to the publication
up until the time of his death in 1909.
The Doylestoxvn Journal is another of Wayne county’s weekly publi-
cations. It is known that the paper was founded in the month of September,
1874, by George W. Everetts, but between that time and 1889 the files
were destroyed and definite facts as to its growth in that period can not be
ascertained. When Mr. Everetts purchased the plant the outfit was brought
to Doylestown from Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, and placed in the base-
ment of the Presbyterian church, and for several years was located and oper-
ated in this building. J. V. McElhenie, now a resident of Canton, Ohio,
was the second owner of the paper. For a time after his purchase Mr.
McElhenie discontinued the paper, but later resumed it. During its exist-
ence the paper has been owned by William Smith. George A. Corbus, A. R.
DeFluent, Dr. B. F. Putt and W. S. Hochstettler. W. R. Gillespie, the
present editor and proprietor, purchased the plant from Mr. Hochstettler in
May, 1906.
The W est Salem Reporter , founded in August. 1868, by John Wreeks.
is conceded one of the best papers in the county. Mr. Weeks was succeeded
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by J. W. Hutton, who, in turn, was succeeded by the Rev. F. C. McCauley,
who changed the name of the publication to The Buckeye Farmer. The paper
had a very precarious existence, and in 1876 the office was purchased by E.
T. Atkinson and George W. Brenizer, who changed the name of the publi-
cation to the West Salem Monitor. These gentlemen were at the helm for
a number of years and on retiring disposed of the plant to Robert Watson,
of Canal Dover. After Watson’s death the widow continued as editress,
but was not well supported and finally, in 1888, suspended the publication.
After nearly two years without a paper, Mrs. Watson and daughter. Miss
Mary Watson, resuscitated the paper, and in August, 1891, disposed of the
business to J. W. Kiplinger. Mr. Kiplinger remained in charge of the paper
until February, 1893. Mrs. Watson had in the meantime changed the name
to the West Salem Reporter. A. F. Dunlap, the present owner, bought the
plant in February, 1893, and as its head has brought the paper to the point
where, as we mentioned, it is conceded to be one of the best papers published
in the county. Mr. Dunlap, who does his own writing, both editorially and
locally, is a man of wide experience in the business, and well deserves the
success that his efforts have attained.
In another portion of the county there is another newspaper that has
established for itself a name as well as a large circulation, — we speak of
the Shreve News. This paper was established by W. J. Ashenhurst in the
eighties; in 1896 the plant was purchased by L. S. Miley and Gen. A. B.
Critchfield. Mr. Miley purchased the General’s interest in 1903, since which
time he has been the editor and sole owner. In the period of ownership and
management from 1896 to 1910 the circulation and management of the
News have quadrupled. The paper is independent in politics, and is strictly
a home newspaper, devoted especially to local and county news. One of
the distinct principles of the News, and one for which it deserves hearty
praise, is freedom from sensational ‘'slush” — to publish only the clean, whole-
some happenings of the vicinity.
Mr. Miley, the enterprising manager and editor, was born in Holmes
county, a Democrat by birth and adoption; he taught school for a time,
after which he entered at Ada Normal University and later Mt. Union Col-
lege, at which places he received his education.
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CHAPTER XVII.
THE MEDICAL PROFESSION.
With the settlement of every new country, the family doctor was among
the first of the professions to follow on the trail of the pioneers. His serv-
ices were in demand, even as now. The sick had to be cared for, though with
less skill than at present. The very elements of a new country, the swamps
and unditched lands, the decaying forests and a thousand and one causes,
led to much sickness. The home treatment of mother and grandmother was.
it is true, more relied upon than now, but there were numerous cases in
>\hich the good family doctor had to be called. The rides, usually on horse-
back, made by the pioneer doctors, were long and ofttimes perilous. The
streams were all unbridged and the roads were but blazed trails through the
dense woodland. But by day and by night the faithful physician, with saddle-
bags, would go where he might be called to attend the sick. He was indeed
a hero and in his breast usually beat the largest of hearts. He never refused
to make a sick call because the family might be poor. His bills were carried
over from one year to another, without interest, and many were never
fully paid. While it is true the science of medicine had not then attained
the perfection that now marks its course, yet there were highly educated and
successful doctors in the long ago twenties and thirties of the last century
As much as may, from time to time, be said against the practice of medi-
cine by thoughtless well men and women, there comes a time to each and all
v lien a sight of the good doctor is indeed welcome. When the fevered brow
and quickened pulse torture the victim of some grave and painful malady,
then it is that the suffering one appreciates the warm hand and sympathetic
heart of the physician and takes his treatment without a murmur. The reme-
dies in olden times, however, were not sugar-coated or put up in a form
pleasing to a sick person, as today, but were of the crudest sort, and often
extremely unpalatable. Verily this profession has made wonderful progress
in the b'st fifty years.
Without risking any unsupported claim, or indulging in any fulsome
encomium, it can be truthfully said that the history of the medical profession
and its personnel will compare favorably with any other profession in Wayne
county. Law has produced many distinguished jurists and practitioners on
the bench and at the bar, but medicine has had as brilliant and eminent men
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in its ranks as can be claimed for the legal profession, although, perhaps, they
have not had occasion to display their talents as have the followers of Black-
stone. Wayne county furnished a number of surgeons during the Civil war
who rendered services both on the battlefield and in the tented hospitals.
The present-day physicians have no real conception of what hardships,
exposure and trials were the lot of the early physicians of Wayne county.
They were not blessed with macadamized roads, automobiles, coupes, depot
wagons, taxicabs and closed carriages ; but rode through thick and thin, hot
and cold, at all hours of the day and night, on horseback, with the old-time
saddlebags strapped to their saddles. Some of the pioneer doctors would
ride many miles over the country, in mid-winter, leaving at daylight and not
returning till night, worn out from exposure, fatigue and nervous tension.
It was characteristic of them to minister to the sick without reference to
fee or reward, as the majority of the people were poor and, while honestly
inclined, were unable to pay for medical attendance. One physician, now
gone to his reward, who practiced his profession here for over a quarter
of a century, estimated that he had done over thirty thousand dollars’ worth
of medical service, for possibly half of which he received no cash, and many
times no thanks. While there is a spirit of grasping for lucre in all pro-
fessions nowadays, yet the earlier practitioners seemed to take to the prac-
tice largely from motives of philanthropy, believing, as was right, that it
was one of the grandest human offices to relieve suffering, to cheer the de-
pressed, to succor from the assaults of disease, and, failing in this, to smooth
the way to the inevitable tomb. There is no loftier mission; none which
more closely assimilates the human with the divine. While the earlier physi-
cians had to depend on the science as a means of livelihood, still they rose
above the purely mercenary motives in their practice. Many of the pioneer
doctors not only ministered to the body, but to the soul as well. Several
practiced medicine and “preached the gospel to the poor.”
It is both amusing and interesting to look back fifty or seventy-five years
and see the character of the service rendered and fees charged in those days.
The doctors worked hard and were poorly paid for their ministrations. It
was the period when “cupping,” “leeching” and bleeding were regarded as
indispensable. The practice was carried to extremes in many cases, as the
practice of venesection was performed on persons who had no blood to spare,
and as a consequence it ceased.
While the practice of medicine was regarded as most honorable, and is
yet, it was then far from lucrative. In looking back, we find some of the fees
charged for medicine and professional services, and it must be remembered
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that doctors then dispensed their own medicines. The charge for visits in
the town was one dollar, and for visits in the country, one dollar for the first
mile, and fifty cents for each succeeding mile; bleeding, fifty cents; two doses
jallap, fifty cents; box of pills, fifty cents; extracting teeth, twenty -five cents;
one dose of calomel and one ounce of paregoric, sixty cents. In surgery, the
fees were very moderate, and even those mentioned were not “in vogue” until
later days, the earliest practitioners making their individual charges, which
were often much less than those enumerated here. Diseases such as dysentery
and fevers were attributed entirely to ‘miasm and visitations of sporadic and
Asiatic cholera were common. Calomel was generally taken to get rid of the
malaria. Bilious fever sometimes developed, but generally yielded to the
calomel and quinine treatment, which, if somewhat heroic, was generally suc-
cessful, after the disease had run its course. Some years the ague was worse
than others, and at times there were not enough well persons to take care of
the sick. Often the entire family would be down at one time and no one to
give them even a drop of water. In winter the most common disease was
winter fever, now known under its proper name — pneumonia. But sickness
was really rare, except chills and fever in the fall, or, as it was generally
called, the ague, in which, in the first stage, a coldness, that no fire could
warm, took hold of the victim, and he shook and shivered so severely that the
bed would shake and even the dishes in the cupboard rattle. “A chill which
no coat, however stout, of homespun stuflf, could quite shut out.” After an
hour or two of this paroxysm the patient began to get warm and was soon
in the agony of a raging fever. In an hour or two more this would pass
and the patient, apparently none the worse for his shake, went about his busi-
ness until the second day, when the attack invariably returned. Quinine was
the remedy always used in the treatment of this disease, which was considered
the only helpful remedy, and is so regarded by many today. The old-fash-
ioned ague, where the victim almost shook himself to pieces, was very com-
mon in the spring and fall, and, besides the remedies mentioned, good big
draughts of Peruvian bark and whiskey were also the sheet anchors. Whiskey
was found in every house and every one drank more or less, although it was
usually confined to the morning dram, except in sickness. It was made from
corn and was much purer and more wholesome than the vile stuflf now pur-
chased in saloons and drug stores. Drunkenness was almost unknown in
those days and it was the custom to show the hospitality of the home by pro-
ducing the bottle. No thought of discourtesy entered the mind of either when
the minister was offered the contents of “Black Bettie,” after his journey
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through the wilderness or the exertion of a two-hour discourse. Whiskey
was worth only about twenty cents a gallon, and as it was made from corn,
that was still cheaper, it was within the reach of all; but that fact did not lead
to drunkenness. But with the springing up of villages, with their “dogger-
ies,” a change of sentiment took place, and ere long the habit of whiskey
drinking began to be looked upon with disfavor and, so far as home drinking
is concerned, has about passed away in all states except some remote mountain
regions. Although the pioneer physician did not find it necessary to carry a
supply of whiskey along with his medicines, he usually recommended it to his
patients, especially advising a free use of it when “winter-fever” was prev-
alent, for this was the most fatal of all frontier diseases, probably because
of a lack of proper treatment, owing to its true nature not being well under-
stood.
Births in the early days were in the hands of the older women of the
settlements and were rarely attended with unpleasant or dangerous conse-
quences.
The following is a list, as complete as is possible to give after so many
years have rolled into oblivion, of the physicians who have practiced the heal-
ing art within Wayne county. Many are dead, many of them removed to
other sections of the country and some are still living here :
Dr. Thomas Townsend, the pioneer physician of Wooster, was of Qua-
ker parentage, and a native of Pennsylvania. He removed to Wooster in
1810-11, remained there about thirty years, when he went to Wheeling, West
Virginia, where he died. He was a man of marked ability in his profession,
and performed a considerable part in the organization of the town and county.
He held different positions of official relations and responsibility, prominent
among which was an associate judgeship in 1819.
Dr. Daniel McPhail was another early-dav physician of Wooster, settling
at least as early as 1818. He was born and educated in Scotland; was a man
of unusual acquirements and a splendid chemist. He practiced medicine in
Wooster about twelve years, but prejudice rose against him and he was sued
for malpractice. Judge Charles Sherman, father of General Sherman, de-
fended him, and Judge Edward Avery conducted the prosecution. In the
trial Doctor McPhail vanquished his persecutors and was triumphantly vindi-
cated. Desiring to avoid hostile combinations, he removed to Tennessee and
thence to New Orleans. Later he went back to Tennessee, where he acquired
a vast practice, and where he died, having achieved a great reputation for
skill in his profession.
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Dr. Stephen F. Day was a formidable man in the profession of medicine
and wore the baton of a field marshal in the empire of physics. The annals
of medical practice may supply a more illustrious name, but it is doubted if
as a practitioner in his chosen sphere and field he had many equals or superi-
ors. He entered the list not for the purpose of eliciting applause, starving
competitors or of being a subaltern. His was a higher aim — that of acquir-
ing a transcendent skill; of mastering the abstrusities of the books; of pene-
trating the mysterious origins of disease ; of exploring the ingeniously con-
trived, most complicated and most wonderfully constructed temple of life; of
ennobling the ministry of pain, and exalting and glorifying his profession.
His pronounced motto was :
“To guard is better than to heal,
The shield is nobler than the spear.”
He despised the vandal horde of mountebanks and quack professors that
swoop down upon a community, devastate human habitations, augment the
total of human misery, and who, in the solemn flight of death, allow not a sin-
gle straggler to get home. He ever insisted that infinite mischief was oc-
casioned by this piebald army of dog killers, insect hunters, weed pickers,
spider catchers, cockle shell mongers, and brass- faced, unlettered charlatans
that too often infest communities and, like the army in Caesar's time, slay in
chariots and slay on foot.
Doctor Day — a truly remarkable man — was a native of Morris county.
New Jersey, bom September 4, 1798. When seven years old, he accompanied
his father to Washington county, Pennsylvania, where he spent his time on
a farm and where he remained until past sixteen years of age. He then,
with an iron will, decided to press forth into life’s activities for himself.
Bidding farewell to home and kindred, he set out on horseback, attired in
homespun garments and with twenty-five cents in his pocket. He labored
hard at whatever his hands found honorable to perform. As a basis upon
which to build his professional life, he commenced the elementary study of
medicine with Doctor Leatherman, of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, his course
concluding with a diploma from the Medical College of Philadelphia. He
immediately entered into the practice of medicine at Florence, Pennsylvania.
He was equipped with pill-bag, nauseating jalap, the savage knife and the
blades that shine, prepared to make a heal or a lasting scar. In the early
spring of 1827 he came to Wooster, Ohio, the arena of a life of patient and
exhaustive toil and the theatre of his subsequent professional career. Here
he continued in practice until 1861, when approaching bodily infirmities ad-
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monished him to surrender the field and fortress he had so long and valiantly
maintained.
Doctor Day was united happily in marriage, in 1833, to Eliza E.
Straughan, of Salem. Ohio. In March, 1863, he was attacked by paralysis,
from the effects of which he never fully recovered, but was confined to his
bed until November 25, 1869, when a second attack suddenly caused his
death. It is safe to assert that no physician and surgeon of this county en-
joyed the monopoly of his profession as did this truly skillful man. His cir-
cuit of visitation was not confined to Wayne county, but extended far out
into the adjoining counties. By some, in his surgery he was called heartless,
but he was not — he knew what had to be done and went straight at the work.
Then he lived in an age before the science had made such strides as has been
attained in the handling of the knife. He was a man of clear judgment and
positive mind, and was extremely cautious of his conclusions at the bed of
illness, but when his mind was made up no one could* change his opinion. Per-
sonally, he was a man of imposing appearance, stood over six feet in stature
and erect as a column. He was a great worker at whatever he turned his at-
tention to and this rewarded him with honors and wealth. Many young men
of talent took their instructions under Doctor Day, two of the most prom-
inent of these being Dr. Edward Thompson, the renowned Methodist bishop,
who died in Wheeling, West Virginia, March 22, 1870, and Dr. Leander
Firestone, the eminent surgeon of Wooster. The former was in the office of
Doctor Day from 1833 to ^36 and the latter gentleman from 1839 to 1842.
So long as the practice of medicine is known and talked of in Wooster and
Wayne county, the name of Doctor Day will ever shine as among the bright
stars in the science of medicine.
Dr. Samuel Norton Bissell, born January 22, 1809, in the village of Ver-
non. Oneida county, New York, came of good old English ancestry. His
father was a celebrated physician from near Hartford, Connecticut. Samuel
N„ of this notice, was named for his grandfather, with whom his earlier
years were spent in Connecticut. Under the careful guidance of both his
father and paternal grandfather, he succeeded in procuring more than an
ordinary education. He was a student and thorough investigator from the
very first decade of his existence. Having chosen medicine as his profession,
he embarked at once on the sea of life with this in mind. He pushed west,
came to Wooster finally, and here entered the office of his uncle. Dr. Heze-
khh Bissell, then a successful physician of the little village. He remained
with him. studying until he had completed his elementary course and college
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course, when he entered upon the real duties of a well educated doctor. In
September, 1832, he married Eliza, daughter of Hon. John Sloane. He fol-
lowed his chosen profession in Wooster until his death, on June 13, 1848.
The circumstances surrounding his death were indeed painful and affecting.
His youngest sister, Eunice C., wife of Harvey Howard, then residing in
Tiffin, Ohio, was seriously ill. A courier was sent to Doctor Bissell, sum-
moning him immediately to her bedside. With promptness, he obeyed the
request. There being no railroad direct to that city, he had to cross the
county, from which exposure he was prostrated with pneumonia, from the
effects of which, absent from his own home and in the house of his suffering
sister, he suddenly died. Verily, indeed he was a martyr for his friends and
the behest of duty. His remains were conveyed to Wooster and deposited
in the old Presbyterian burying ground, and later removed to the city cemetery.
He left two sons, J. S. and H. H. Bissell. His wife survived him until 1871.
His own death fell upon the people of Wayne county, and Wooster especial-
ly. like a thunder clap from out a clear summer sky. He was short in stature,
but a perfect specimen of manhood.
It should be recorded of Doctor Bissell that the mystery and origin of
life were not comprised in his motives; simply the perfection and healthy,
symmetrical preservation of that life. It mattered not to Blind Tom who
made the musical instrument on which he played ; his mission was to elicit its
harmonies, correct its discords and make it perform a perfect work. With
this interpretation of his duties, Doctor Bissell practiced medicine, and in the
varied walks of his profession distinguished himself as one of the most popu-
lar and scientific physicians and surgeons in northern Ohio. He was a man
of strong attachments and of an amiable and benevolent disposition; of kind
heart and strong brain. Politically, he was Whig, and had he taken to it
he would have made an excellent political manager. He served in the capac-
ity of associate judge of the common pleas court in 1845. While he was
practical and businesslike, those who knew him best testify to his warmth of
feeling and noble disposition. Such in brief is the history of the subject of
this memoir: such his skill and learning.
Dr. W. C. Moore was born in Columbiana county, Ohio, June 1. 1822.
His parents removed to W'avne county and settled in Chester township in
1832. He remained with his parents until he was twenty years of age, when,
in 1842. he began the study of medicine with Dr. Leander Firestone, then
practicing in Congress village. Congress township. There he continued a
student of medicine for three years, engaging in school teaching in the winter
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seasons. After finishing his elementary readings and having graduated, he
began practice with his preceptor in 1845, continuing there a year, then moved
to Rowsburg, where he remained another year, when he returned to Congress
village and remained with Doctor Firestone for ten years. Though not a
full-fledged politician, he was popular in his party throughout the county, and
in 1859 was elected to the Democratic Legislature of Ohio, by that party,
serving from December 2, i860, to January 6, 1862. In 1862 he- removed to
Wooster, where he practiced afterwards. It was written of him in 1878
that “His mind is bright, analytical, and he arrives at conclusions, not simply
as a result of his logical premises, but by his actual comparative knowledge.
His social developments are of a high order, and his heart and sou? are not
hidden under ice, but lie near a warm tropical surface, where they expand
into sunshine and burst into flowers. He was somewhat of a poet and the
following is the closing verse of a long poem he wrote many years since, the
same being suggested by a visit to his mother’s grave in a Wooster cemetery :
“Thy lips are sealed, thy silent tongue is eloquent no more;
I plead in vain for tidings from that far, far-gleaming shore;
No mortal eye hath ever scanned that radiant realm so fair —
No mortal ear hath ever heard that hallowed harping there;
Faith’s eye alone hath scaled the mount on whose bright top appears
Heaven’s citadel, high lifted up above this vale of tears.
Amid life’s wreck a childlike faith, in inspiration given,
Will light the tomb and open wide the jewelled gates of Heaven.’’
Dr. Leander Firestone, who long adorned the medical fraternity of
Wayne county, was possessed of rare genius. In a world where all men can-
not be inventors and discoverers, it is pleasing to note the virtues and strength
of the few who do thus appear from time to time. In medicine there are but
few men who combine all the traits indispensable to a true physician. Doctor
Firestone not only vindicated his claim to an exalted rank in surgery, but
in every department of the occult mysteries of medicine he wielded a strong
pen, talked with the freedom of the gushing brook, and presided over the
studies of others with eminent success, and to the fame thus achieved with
scalpel he added the luster of instructor.
The Doctor was born in Saltcreek township, Wayne county, Ohio, in
1819. After he attained his fourteenth year his time was spent at routine
farm labor in the summer months, while in winter he attended the common
country school. He then went to Columbiana county, near Salem, where he
worked and attended country schools again. We next trace him to Portage
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county, Ohio, where he chopped cord word for three shillings per cord and
hard beech wood at that. We next find him located two miles north of New
Pittsburg, Wayne county, with his uncle, John Firestone, with whom he re-
mained until eighteen years old. He finally became a country school teacher,
teaching his first term in Perry township, Ashland county, Ohio, receiving
twelve dollars a month for his services and boarded himself.
In August, 1838, Leander Firestone was married to Susan Firestone,
and the next year — when he was twenty years old — he commenced the study
of medicine with Dr. S. F. Day, with whom he remained three years, during
which time he took a course of lectures at the Medical College of Philadelphia.
In March, 1841, he located in practice at the village of Congress, this county,
where he at once met with success. After thirteen years of practice at that
hamlet, he graduated from the Western Reserve College, located at Cleveland.
During these eventful years he had won a fame and far-reaching reputation
as a skillful physician. The college from which he had recently graduated
was in need of someone to occupy a chair, and in its survey for a suitable man
to fill it, the abilities of Doctor Firestone were duly recognized, and in 1847
he was made demonstrator of anatomy in that institution. This position he
held until 1853, after which honorable distinction was awaiting him. He was
appointed superintendent of the North Ohio Lunatic Asylum, at Newburg.
which position he filled until August 6, 1856, when he removed to Wooster,
in which city he ever afterwards practiced. In 1858 he was elected president
of the State Medical Society and in 1864 was made professor of obstetrics
and the diseases of women in Charity Hospital College, at Cleveland, and held
the same for many years. In 1870 this institution was constituted the medical
department of the Wooster University, and he still held the same position as at
Cleveland. June 24, 1874, he was made Doctor of Laws by the University
of Ohio, at Athens. As a public lecturer the Doctor was eloquent and always
popular, no matter what his theme. His descriptive powers were fine and
interesting. He was an advanced thinker and a highly practical worker in the
medical ranks. He held the position of superintendent of the Columbus
(Ohio) Insane Asylum a number of years.
Dr. W W. Firestone, son of the celebrated Dr. Leander Firestone and
his intelligent wife, adds another to the list of good medical practitioners of
Wayne county. He was born in Congress, Wayne county, February 25,
1842. His parents, both highly educated, had their son also well schooled,
he having the advantages of the Wooster city schools and select and gradu-
ated teachers, under whose tutelage he completed his desired course of study.
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For three years he attended Mount Union College, and in 1861 began reading
medicine with his father. A term of four years was spent in study, in pro-
fessional assistance to his father, and in attendance on lectures, at the expira-
tion of which period he graduated from Charity Hospital College, Cleveland,
Ohio, now the medical department of the University of Wooster. In 1865 he
devoted himself entirely to his profession, and soon found himself a partner
in the office of Leander Firestone, M. D. He made rapid strides in his call-
ing. Constant and ever watchful and of good judgment, he could scarcely
be expected to fail at any point and he never did.
Dr. James D. Robison was born April 23, 1820, at the corner of Buck-
eye and North streets, Wooster, Wayne county, Ohio. His early years were
spent with his father, Thomas Robison. Esq., during which time he spent much
of his time attending the village schools, procuring such education as the lim-
ited opportunities of that day afforded. At the age of seventeen years he
hired as a clerk to Robison & McCune, where he remained until he was twenty,
at which time, and in accordance with an intention previously resolved upon,
he commenced the study of medicine. He entered the office of Dr. Samuel
Norton Bissell, in February, 1840, continuing with him until 1841, when,
during the fall, he proceeded to Philadelphia, availing himself of a course of
lectures at the Jefferson Medical College of that city, soon thereafter taking
advantage of the clinical course of instruction at the Brooklyn Hospital. The
summer of 1842 he spent in Cincinnati, in pursuit of his professional work
in the office of Dr. William Wood, simultaneously attending lectures at the
Medical College of Ohio and a clinical course at the Commercial Hospital of
Cincinnati. In the autumn of 1842 he returned to Philadelphia, where he
graduated and received his diploma in March, 1843. He then returned to
Wooster, remained during the summer months, the following fall removing
to Queen City, locating there and actively engaging in the practice of his
chosen profession. Here he met with signal success, and continued until
July 3, 1846, and until the breaking out of the war with Mexico. He was
made surgeon of the Third Regiment Ohio Volunteers, leaving Cincinnati
the same day for Old Mexico. Arriving at New Orleans on the gth of July,
he spent a few days in that city and proceeded to Brazos de Santiago, arriving
August 6th at Camp Curtis, opposite the old city of Matamoras. December
9th he was assigned to the Third Illinois Regiment as surgeon and was ordered
by Gen. Zac Taylor to Victoria and later joined Gen. Winfield Scott’s com-
mand at Tampico, and in March they were sent to Vera Cruz, where seventeen
days afterwards the Mexican forces surrendered, the United States taking
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possession of the city. On April io, 1847, on account of illness, Doctor Rob-
ison resigned his commission and returning to Wooster, Ohio, and in October
of that year formed a partnership with J. P. Coulter, M. D., for the practice
of medicine, which relation continued to the fall of 1853. The next year he
spent in and about the New York hospitals and medical institutions, keeping
abreast with the progress and discoveries of the profession. He again re-
turned to Wooster in the autumn of 1854, opened an office and engaging in
the practice until 1861, when the Civil w^ar broke out. He immediately tend-
ered his services to his government, which were promptly accepted, he being
assigned to the Sixteenth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, with which he
was identified throughout the three-months service. He wras engaged in the
battle of Phillippi, one of the first engagements of that long-drawn-out wrar.
He it was who had the honor of amputating the first leg during the wrar, that
of a Confederate soldier. He was promoted to the rank of brigade surgeon
in July. 1861, and assigned to the command of General Rosecrans. Later he
organized hospitals along the Kenawha and assumed charge of the one situ-
ated at Gallipolis. After being wdth Generals Shields and Banks and with
McClellan, and being inspecting surgeon, wffiich position he retained until the
battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, he was ordered to Washington to
take charge of the Patent Office Hospital, where he remained until he was
compelled to resign on account of his wdfe’s illness. On his return home, he
w as appointed surgeon of the board of enrollment for this district, which place
he held during the remainder of the Rebellion. From the very outset, in
1840, his was a well fought battle. Hence it will be seen by the foregoing
that he acted well his part in two great wars. Had he ventured on the polit-
ical field it is almost certain that he would have been elected to a seat in
Congress.
Dr. A. M. McMillen was a native of Jefferson county, Ohio, born at
Steubenville, in 1816, the son of a millwright and farmer, with wrhom he re-
mained during all of his earlier years. After educating himself, he taught
school for eight years. He then read medicine in Canal Fulton wfith Doctor
Howard, and graduated at the old Medical College of Cleveland. He began
practice at W est Lebanon in 1849, continuing there until his death, which
occurred May 4, 1874. He was married in the spring of 1849 to Rebecca
Neeper. of Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, and as a result became the father
of eight children. He was a devout member of the Presbyterian church at
Mount Eaton.
Dr. D. H. McMillen, a nephew' of Dr. A. M. McMillen, was bom in
Stark county. Ohio, October 13, 1848. He read medicine with his uncle and
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graduated from the Cincinnati College of Medical Surgery in June, 1874.
He began practice with his uncle in July, 1874, and was for years a well
known physician and surgeon of West Lebanon.
Dr. William B. Blachley was born in New Jersey, from which state he
removed to Washington county, Pennsylvania, where he remained twenty
years, when he emigrated to Plain township, Wayne county, in 1816. He
was twice married, and was the father of nineteen children. He practiced
medicine in Blachley ville nineteen years, when he removed to Valparaiso,
Indiana, where he died at the age of seventy-four years. He was a graduate
of Princeton College (now University) and a member of the Baptist church.
The village of Blachley ville is named in honor of him. His son, William,
also a doctor, was born in Washington county, Pennsylvania, November 27,
1799, and came to Plain township, this county, with his father, with whom he
read medicine and commenced to practice. His eldest daughter married
Doctor Hunt, of Shreve, Ohio, and the youngest became the wife of Capt.
Benjamin, son of Constant Lake, of Wooster.
Dr. D. L. Moncrief was a grandson of a Scotchman and the son of the
Moncrief who settled at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from where he removed to
Canonsburg, Washington county. There the subject of this notice was born
September 23, 1823, and resided on a farm until fifteen years of age. He
attended Jefferson College, and at the age of twenty-two years commenced
the study of medicine with Dr. Israel Moore, of Canonsburg, with whom he
remained three years as a student, and then removed to western Ohio. In
1853 he concluded his medical course at Cincinnati. From Mercer county,
Ohio, he came to Wayne county, settling at Orrville in March, 1857, at once
entering upon a successful practice and residing there many years. He was
postmaster at Orrville in 1861, appointed by President Lincoln, and served
eight years. In church relations he was a devout member of the United
Presbyterian church. He carved out his own earthly destiny, acquired com-
petence and wealth, and by his manly methods won the deserved confidence
and respect of all worthy citizens of Wayne county.
Dr. J. H. Stoll was born in Chippewa township, Wayne county. Ohio.
May 2, 1849, his father being Christian Stoll, a wealthy and progressive
farmer. He remained at home until he was sixteen years of age. when he
attended the Smithville Academy, and from thence to Savannah, Ashland
county, Ohio, where he remained two years. At the age of twenty he began
reading medicine with L. Firestone, M. D., LL. D., of Wooster. After tak-
ing thorough courses in the best medical colleges in the land, he graduated
in 1871, and at once entered upon the practice of his profession at Marshall-
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ville, this county, where he continued for eighteen months, when he went to
London, England, and there received lectures at Kings College, but on ac-
count of sickness was compelled to return home, when he located at Orrville.
He was made surgeon of the C. Mt. & C. railroad company and also of the
Ninth Ohio National Guards, all previous to 1878.
Dr. W. B. Hyatt was born March 29, 1829. He studied medicine and
practiced at Marshallville. He was in the Union army two and a half years,
was wounded by a rebel shell and received other bodily injuries which pro-
duced atrophy of the muscles and anchylosis of the left shoulder joint.
Dr. W. T. Barnes was born November 10, 1843, and worked on the
farm until seventeen years of age, when he entered the Union army, enlisting
as a private in the Fifty-first Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry. After his
return from the army he attended school at Lexington, Ohio, and in 1866
began the study of medicine with John Russell, M. D., of Mt. Vernon, gradu-
ating from Charity Hospital College, Cleveland, in the spring of 1869. and
the next year began the practice of medicine in Fredericksburg, where he was
a successful doctor and surgeon many years.
Dr. James Martin was born October 20, 1824, at the old Martin home-
stead, on Martin creek, Wayne county, and descended from an old and highly
respectable Ohio family. He remained at home until twenty-two years of
age. attending the public schools about three months each winter after he was
of school-going age. Later he attended a select school at Fredericksburg for
a number of years, after which he began teaching school. He read medicine
with Dr. T. B. Abbott, of Massillon, Ohio, and during the time availed him-
self of a course of medical lectures then being given by William Bowen, of
Akron, Ohio, subsequently graduating at the Jefferson Medical College, of
Philadelphia. He commenced his practice in East Rochester, Columbiana
county, in August, 1850, remained three years, then removed to Fredericks-
burg in 1854. He married, in 1851, Elizabeth Craig, by whom seven children
were born. The Doctor was a thorough gentleman and had a large country
practice for many years.
Dr. William S. Battles, who for a long period was pronounced one of
Wavne county’s eminent and highly successful physicians, was born at White
Hall Station, then a suburb of Philadelphia, May 12, 1827. On his paternal
side he was half Scotch, his father being a descendant of an old Pittsfield
family, of Berkshire county, Massachusetts. On the maternal side old Eng-
lish blood coursed through his veins. His mother’s maiden name was Susan
Snowden, a native of Philadelphia, all of whose ancestors were Quakers for
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more than two hundred years. Thomas S., father of Doctor Battles, removed
from Philadelphia to Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, remained there less
than three years and then went farther west, locating in September, 1833, a
mile and a half north of the present village of Shreve, Wayne county, Ohio.
His father was a farmer and young Battles was used to and liked the work
usually practiced upon a farm. At the age of nineteen a change came over
the spirit of his dreams. He then abandoned the farm and entered Haysville
(Ashland county) Academy, where he put forth every effort in gaining use-
ful knowledge from books and teachers. He taught his first school when he
was twenty years old. In August, 1847, he entered the office of Dr. T. H.
Baker, of Millbrook, with whom he remained a period of four years, teaching
during the meantime, with the exception of six months, both summer and
winter. He attended his first course of lectures at Starling Medical College
during the winter of 1850-51 and then began to practice medicine with his
preceptor, completing his course at Columbus, graduating February 22, 1852.
On his return home he resumed practice with Doctor Baker, continuing with
him until the winter of 1853, which he spent in Cleveland, Philadelphia and
New York, in attendance upon the hospitals of those cities, at the termination
of which time he once more renewed his professional labors with his old pre-
ceptor. In the spring of 1855 he went to Edinburg, in East Union township,
where he stayed seven months, during which time he became a member of the
American Medical Association. He was married, in November, 1855. to
Mahala Keister, of Millbrook, daughter of J. A. Keister, Esq. In December
of that year he proceeded to the village of Shreve, where he practiced until
the spring of 1865, when, owing to lung trouble, with which he had suffered
for a number of years, he abandoned medical practice and indulged in travel
for one year. In 1866 he was one of the four men who organized the Ash-
land Citizens Bank, and he resided there a year. But becoming dissatisfied
with commercial life, he sold his banking interest and. his health having been
restored, he returned to Shreve, recommencing his practice there and ever
after continued in the same. The Doctor was solely devoted to his chosen
profession and loved it with the fondness seldom seen in physicians of today.
While a student, he joined the Wayne County Medical Society, in 1851, and
was also a member of the Ohio State Medical Society. He represented his
home society at Chicago in 1863 and at St. Louis in 1873. He was vice-
president of the Northern Ohio Medical Association. He was devoted to the
church of his choice, the Methodist Episcopal; loved poetry and good litera-
ture, wrote both prose and poetry: contributed to the University of Wooster;
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aided the Shreve public schools, and, like Tennyson, always looked forward
to the Golden Year. One of his gems of poetry of song has this for its first
verse :
“We love thee, Lord, we’ve long professed.
But do we love our brother?
We love ourselves we fear too much.
Oh, help us love each other/’
Dr. Charles J. Warner was born in Wayne township, Wayne county,
Ohio, January i, 1836, a son of Peter Warner, a farmer and a native of Sun-
bury, Northumberland county. Pennsylvania, and the son lived at home until
eighteen years of age. The farm life, we are quite ready to believe, harmo-
nized with the developing manhood of Doctor Warner, and enabled him to be-
come a splendid type of robust manhood. After availing himself of the com-
mon schools, he followed teaching school after nineteen years of age, first
teaching in the Rumbaugh district, for which he was paid eighteen dollars a
month and boarded himself. He attended school in the summer months and
taught school in the winter time. He kept this up for five years in succession.
During this time he became a proficient English scholar and acquired a valu-
able knowledge of the Latin language. From an early age, young Warner
had conceived the idea of becoming a physician and, in furtherance of this
purpose, in March, 1857. he entered the office of Dr. W. C. Moore, then prac-
ticing in the village of Congress, with whom he remained four years, three as
a student and one in partnership with him. He then went to Homerville,
Medina county, Ohio, where he spent two years, during the time attended a
course of study at the Cleveland Medical College, from which he graduated
in 1862. In the spring of the last named year he returned to Congress and
there set up a medical practice which he held for many years. He married,
September 15, 1859, Mary E. Pancoast, of Congress village. In stature it
was written of him in the late seventies that he was “solid, stands six feet
high, weighs two hundred and seventeen pounds, is built of substantial ma-
terial, has a bright, intellectual face, is a man of pleasing manner and affable
disposition, of fair complexion, firm and erect in carriage. He is a self-made,
self-taught man. He was of a wide range and was forceful as an educator
and writer on educational topics. He delivered more than a score of excellent
lectures and public addresses on schools and education in Wayne county,
alone.”
Dr. Justin Georget, a native of France, born June 23, 1830, in Mountu-
saine, and with his father, in 1840, emigrated to America, removing to Can-
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ton, Ohio, where he died. He entered the United States army, remaining one
year at Governor’s Island, when he was transferred to West Point Military
Academy and remained there four years. He read medicine with J. P.
Bairick, of Massillon, Ohio, graduated and, after a series of removals, came
to Congress village, Wayne county, and thence on to West Salem, in the winter
of 1866 and there practiced medicine in a most successful manner.
Dr. J. S. Cole was a native of Allegheny City (now Greater Pittsburg),
Pennsylvania, where he was born February 19, 1836, and attended Vermillion
Institute at Haysville, Ashland county, Ohio. He afterward read medicine
with Doctor Glass, and graduated from Cleveland Medical College. He be-
gan practice in Reedsburg, Ashland county, Ohio, and moved to West Salem
in 1873. He married Ruth A. Smith, daughter of James B. Smith, of Ash-
land.
Dr. L. G. Harley was born in Chester county, Pennsylvania, in 1811.
His father was a farmer who moved to Ohio in 1830. In 1833 the son com-
menced reading medicine with Doctor Haddock; attended the course in Phila-
delphia, and graduated there in the spring of 1837. He then located in Dal-
ton, where he soon built up a large and paying medical practice. In the
autumn of 1839 he was married to Mary M. Fluke, of Dalton. His daughter,
Virginia, became a member of the medical fraternity, graduating in the med-
ical department of the University of Michigan. For a short time she prac-
ticed in Wooster with her father; she later married and moved to New York
city. Doctor Harley continued at Dalton thirty-one years and was the well-
known physician in many a score of homes in that section of Wayne county.
He removed to Wooster in 1868 and here continued his practice.
Dr. T. M. Taggart, son of Samuel Taggart, was born in Baughman town-
ship, Wayne county. Ohio, September 22, 1822. He began the study of
medicine with Doctor Bowen, of Massillon, afterwards graduating at the
Cleveland Medical College. In 1848 he began the practice of medicine at
Dalton. He was married in 1849 to Henrietta Slusser, of York county,
Pennsylvania, by whom he had seven children. One was Dr. Hiram D. Tag-
gart, of Akron, Ohio. The father died May 23, 1867, having been a zealous
member of the Methodist Episcopal church for seventeen years before his
decease.
Dr. Moses Shaffer was the son of Jacob Shaffer and Matilda, his wife,
who lived for many years in Chippewa township, Wayne county, Ohio. The
Doctor was born July 15, 1806, and when about the age of eighteen years
commenced the study of medicine, and at twenty-one was admitted to prac-
(22)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
tice as a physician by a board of which Dr. James S. Irvine, of Millersburg,
Ohio, was a member. Mt. Eaton, Wayne county, Ohio, was the first loca-
tion of Doctor Shaffer’s practice, and he was a successful physician. He
removed to Wooster from there, and established a practice, continuing until
he was twenty-seven years of age, when he was married to Margaret McClure,
of a family of high standing at Wooster, and had a family of three sons and
three daughters. The eldest daughter, Adelaide, was married to Hon. L. R.
Critchfield, Sr., and Lyman R. Critchfield, Jr., now a resident lawyer of
Wooster, is one of their sons. The family of the Doctor was one of high
standing in Wooster, and he became one of the leading physicians of Wayne
county. He was of medium size, compact of muscle and nerve, powerfully
active, and was known as a man without fear. He was unusually reticent,
sober, and attended to business; courteous, but an unconquerable antagonist
in a controversy. He was a hunter, and cultivated fine-bred dogs and horses,
and many an anecdote of his nerve in controlling his blooded colts is
related.
Doctor Shaffer established his home and his offices on South Market
street, in Wooster, and practiced his profession there for over fifty years.
He died when eighty-three years of age. He was skillful in diagnosing
diseases and prescribing remedies. He never failed to attend a call; and
his courageous temper defied storms, high waters, cold or any form of
danger. He was modest in his uniform success, and was never known to
boast of his skill or remarkable cures. His remedies were simple, and he
deprived himself of many occasions for practice by generous advice as to
homely methods. His fee was always reasonable, moderate, and he never
would connect himself with medical societies or scale of prices. He was
very conscientious in resorting to surgery, or what is known as “heroic
treatment/' He was a genuine man, a nobleman, without fear or reproach,
and his long life of benevolence, self-sacrifice and professional honesty
endeared him to the people. The mention of his name in most parts of
Wayne county, where he was known, is greeted with expressions of esteem
and eulogies upon his character.
Dr. Hiram M. Shaffer was a son of Dr. Moses Shaffer, and under the
tuition and example of his father and with the breeding of the Shaffers and
the McClures, he became, after his services as a soldier in the Civil war, in
a very brief time, one of the most noted surgeons and physicians in Wayne
county. His death from pneumonia, in August, 1889, at the age of fifty-two
years, induced by exposure in treating a patient, was very widely regretted.
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He had a wonderful genius for his profession. He followed it with ardor
and gave frequent and careful attention to his patients, and deservedly had
the reputation of almost infallible diagnosis and the cure of dangerous
diseases. To detect disease, accurately and quickly, seemed an intuition ; and
his knowledge of modem practice was large. In surgery his nerves were like
iron and he was fearless in the most delicate operations. He was brave,
gc*nerous, a fast friend, powerful as a lion, and was esteemed by everyone
that knew him.
It is a sad commentary on human life that an early death is the obituary
of genius.
PRESENT-DAY PHYSICIANS.
The following is the list of physicians now engaged in the practice of the
profession in Wayne county, the record giving the name, college from which
graduated, year of graduation, and present location.
Bashford, T. A., Ohio Medical University, 1897, Wooster.
Braden, D. H., Cleveland Homeopathic College, 1895, Wooster.
Beer, T. D., Starling Medical College, 1889. Wooster.
Elder. T. A., Rush Medical College. 1868, Wooster.
Graven, T. A., Jefferson Medical College, 1900, Wooster.
H?rt, H. A., University of City of New York, 1867, Wooster.
Johnson, Kate M., University of Michigan, 1900, Wooster.
Knestrick, A. C., Long Island College Hospital, Brooklyn, New York,
1887, Wooster.
Kinney, J. J., University of Wooster Medical Department. 1889, Wooster.
Lerch. C. A.. Cincinnati College of Medicine. 1877, Wooster.
Lehr, J. W., University of Wooster, Medical Department, 1883, Wooster.
Mowery, M. E., University of Wooster. Medical Department, 1896,
Wooster.
Mateer, H. N.. University of Pennsylvania, 1883, Wooster.
Ryall. G. W.. Medical College of Cincinnati, 1888, Wooster.
Stoll, J. H., Jefferson Medical College, 187T, Wooster.
Stoll. Harry J., Rush Medical College, 1900, Wooster.
Todd, J. H., Bellevue Hospital Medical College, 1865, Wooster.
Welch, W. A., Western Reserve, 1884, Wooster.
Warren, R. N., Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College, 1868, Wooster.
Yates, G. A., Omaha Medical College, 1889, Wooster.
Yocum. L. A., Marion Sims Medical College. 1895, Wooster.
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Blankenhorn, H., Western Reserve University, 1890, Orrville.
Brooks, A. H., Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College, 1882, Orrville.
Campbell, A. B., University of Michigan, 1871, Orrville.
Irvin, Geo., Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College, 1903, Orrville.
Shie, D. P., Kentucky School of Medicine, 1892, Orrville.
Grady, O. G., Starling Medical College, 1909, Orrville.
Haney, J. C., Ohio Medical University, 1895, Dalton.
Roebuck, D. Y., University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, 1867, Dalton.
Jamison, J. R., Medico-Chirurgical College of Philadelphia, 1894, Apple
Creek.
King, J. K., Wooster University, Medical Department, 1874, Apple Creek.
Winkler, W. H., Wooster University, Medical Department, 1872, Apple
Creek.
Bertolette, H. B., University of Philadelphia, 1892, Shreve.
Funk, E. N., Starling Medical College, , Shreve.
Paul, R. C., Wooster University Medical Department, 1892, Shreve.
Rhodes, O. A., College of Physicians and Surgeons, Baltimore, 1882,
Rittman.
Sheldon, J. E., Ohio Medical University, 1902, Marshallville.
Pfouts, T. M., Ohio Medical University, 1898, Marshallville.
Long, L. F., Wooster University, Medical Department. 1893, Fredericks-
burg.
Essick, G. C., College of Physicians and Surgeons, Baltimore, 1893, Con-
gress, W. Salem R. D.
Hanna, Chas. M., Kentucky School of Medicine, 1897, Canaan Center,
Creston R. D.
Weaver, Thos. A., Toledo Medical College, 1898, Blachleyville. Wooster
R. D.
Baird, Robert J., Western Reserve. 1896, Creston.
Irvin, J. W., Jefferson Medical College, 1886, Creston.
Allen, V. I., Eclectic Medical Institute, 1907, Creston.
Schollenberger, H. A.. National Normal University, 1892, Smithville.
Yoder, Anna Blattenberg. Cleveland College of Physicians and Surgeons,
1906, Smithville.
Yoder, H. M., Cleveland College of Physicians and Surgeons, 1906,
Smithville.
McKinney, E. H., Ohio Medical University, 1905, Doylestown.
Spencer, E. R., University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, 1870. Doyles-
town.
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Fergeson, J. W., Wooster University. Medical Department, 1876, West
Salem.
Raudebaugh, E. C., Starling Medical College, 1896. West Salem.
Smith, G. C., Western Medical College, London, Canada, 1907, West
Salem.
Brinkerhoff, J. H., Wooster University Medical Department, 1873,
Burbank.
Boor, H. C., Cleveland College of Physicians and Surgeons, 1899, Bur-
bank.
Dawson, N. B., Cincinnati Medical College, 1878, Sterling.
Toland, L. L., Cleveland College of Physicians and Surgeons, 1899,
Sterling.
May, R. J., College of Physicians and Surgeons, Cleveland, 1906, Lattas-
burg, West Salem R. D.
Mowery, A. F., Wooster University Medical Department, 1886, Reeds-
burg, Wooster R. D.
Clark, C. N., College of Physicians and Surgeons, Cleveland, 1904, Mt.
Eaton.
Snively. J. H., Cincinnati Medical College, 1891, West Lebanon.
Snivelv, Geo., Cincinnati Medical College. 1900, West Lebanon, Justus
R. D.
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CHAPTER XVIII.
RAILROADS, CANALS AND TURNPIKES OF WAYNE COUNTY.
At a session of the Ohio Legislature, in 1824, an act was passed on
February 2d of that year providing for the incorporation of a company for
the purpose of constructing a turnpike road from Wooster to Cleveland,
Ohio. In the April numbers of the Wooster Spectator notice was given that
“books will be opened at the house of Gaius Boughton, in Cleveland; at the
house of John Hickcox, in Medina; at the house of John Hemperly, in
Wooster, for the purpose of receiving subscriptions of stock” for the same.
Rufus Ferris was president of the board of commissioners and John Freese
was secretary.
In a short time thereafter the “pike” was completed. Hon. Benjamin
Jones was one of the directors. This turnpike served the people along its
route very well, and carried out the notion that had been uppermost in the
minds of the people regarding some better manner of transporting the com-
modities of their farms to the larger market centers of the state. A toll
fee was charged, yet, the teamster being able to draw so much greater loads
and in so much less time, the fee seemed but trivial.
THE OHIO CANAL.
As the state settled up and civilization advanced in its methods, the
people clamored for still further internal improvements, and as the age of
canals in the United States was then dawning, the subject of their construc-
tion agitated the minds of the more progressive portion of the settlements in
the Buckeye state, as well as in Indiana and Illinois. In 1825 was com-
menced the construction of a canal from Cleveland to Portsmouth, on the
Ohio river, a distance of three hundred and seven miles. It was completed
in 1832, at a cost of five hundred thousand dollars. July 4, 1825, the cere-
mony of breaking the first ground on the National road, west of the Ohio,
was celebrated. On the same day ground was broken at Licking Summit for
the construction of the Ohio canal. The immortal De Witt Clinton, of New
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York, whose colossal mind projected the great Erie canal, threw out the
first shovelful of earth on this occasion.
Surveys were made by Gen. Alfred Kelly and M. T. Williams, the canal
commissioners, through Wayne county as early as 1823, from the head of
the Killbuck and on south through the county to Millersburg.
A sale of lots Was offered in May, 1824, in Millersburg, which read:
“The situation is high, pleasant and healthy, on the navigable water and on
the Killbuck line of the Ohio canal.”
It is said the route through Wayne county was defeated by a single
vote. It is certain, however, that the Ohio canal furnished the farmers the
old Fulton and Massillon markets, — gave them cash for their produce, —
and the date of its completion defines the transition period of the early
history of Wayne county.
THE RAILROAD ERA.
The first railroad agitation of much importance in Wayne county was
with reference to the Cleveland & Columbus line in 1845. A meeting was
held October 16, 1845, m pursuance to a call published by John P. Jeffries,
Esq., and others, to take into consideration prompt action regarding secur-
ing this most vital link of rail communication between the East and West.
This railroad mass-meeting was presided over by Hon. Cyrus Spink,
E. Quinby, Jr., acting as secretary. It was resolved and determined upon
this occasion to convene a county meeting November 1st of the same year.
This call was responded to with promptness and general public inter-
est, and measures were set on foot to raise sufficient funds for the execution
of a complete survey of the proposed road. The survey was made, but
excitement and interest arose in regard to a proposed road from Pittsburg
to Chicago, Illinois, and which finally culminated in the building of the
Pittsburgh, Ft. Wayne & Chicago railroad.
Hon. John Larwill, Dr. S. F. Day, John McSweeney, Esq., David
Robison, Sr., J. P. Jeffries, Jesse R. Straughan, E. Quinby, Jr., Eugene Par-
dee, Esq., and several others whose names are now forgotten, having long
since died, immediately went to work, making speeches, canvassing town and
county, and making every conceivable endeavor to procure subscriptions.
Everybody went to work, unitedly, shoulder to shoulder, and the enterprise
was pressed forward, until the great project was grandly and successfully
consummated.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
The two Wooster newspapers rivaled each other in setting forth the
best of arguments possible to put in type for the people to read. The col-
umns of these papers — the Republican and Democrat — contained page upon
page of articles concerning the proposed highway from Pittsburg to the
lake at Chicago. From a letter written by J. P. Jeffries, Esq., of Wooster,
we quote the following:
“That the stock will be profitable, there is not the possibility of a doubt
— that it will net the stockholders over ten per cent per annum is in our
opinion just as certain. * * *
“Nearly every man in this county is able to take one share, and this
he should do, particularly the owner of real estate, because he will be bene-
fited just in proportion to his business, be it great or small. Should every
man in this county, Who subscribes a share of fifty dollars, lose it entirely,
he will still be the gainer, from the fact that the value of his land, his labor,
and the price of his produce will greatly enhance; and the business of the
merchant and mechanic will increase in proportion to that of the farmer,
and thus the benefit of the road will be repaid/’
This road was the capital and emphatic enterprise of Wayne county.
The solution and consummation of it is witnessed in the majestic line of
steel rail that threads the country from Pittsburg to Chicago, now popularly
styled the “Pennsylvania System/’
Let it be forever remembered that to Hon. John Larwill must be the
honor of procuring this road’s charter, as against wonderful opposition made
at Pittsburg and Cleveland, as well as Steubenville and the roads centering in
Indianapolis. The charter having finally been obtained, it became necessary
for some one to follow up the work of soliciting subscriptions, completing
the organization, and conducting the affairs to a successful issue.
Except what was done at Salem, in Columbiana county, no general con-
vention was had in behalf of the road until June. 1848, when a meeting was
convened at Canton, and directors were elected, consisting of Messrs. Rob-
inson and Bakewell, of Pittsburg: Pinney, of Beaver; Street, of Salem; Well-
man, of Massillon; J. Larwill, of Wooster, and C. T. Sherman, of Mans-
field. At this stage the possibility of making the ascent from the Ohio
river up to the table lands of Columbiana county was doubted by the friends
and stoutly denied by the enemies of the route. Nothing was done but to
order surveys and explorations in that region, and to provide means to pay
the expenses of the surveys.
The first chain ever stretched over the line of the present Pittsburgh,
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Fort Wayne & Chicago railroad was at Bowls Point, at the mouth of the
Big Beaver, July 4, 1848, by Jesse R. Straughan, engineer, in pursuance of
the orders of this board.
By the next winter, lines had been run by all possible routes from the
mouth of Big Beaver river, and that of the Little Beaver, and from the
mouth of the Yellow creek, and from all this extended and exhaustive data
the selection of the route was submitted to the decision of Col. W. Roberts,
chief engineer, of Philadelphia, who was endorsed and recommended by the
officers of the Pennsylvania Central Railroad Company, as possessing the
confidence of themselves and the eastern capitalists.
As the friends of the other routes considered that only one road west-
ward from Pittsburg could ever be expected, their efforts were proportion-
ately vigorous and unceasing.
The condition of affairs and the opinions held by men of wisdom ( ?)
at that day may best be inferred by quoting from a railroad pamphlet
directed to the Board of Trade of Pittsburg, dated October, 1848, and signed,
among many others, by him whom we now know as Lincoln’s able secretary
of war, Hon. Edward M. Stanton. It reads as follows :
“Obstructions of Snow. — This is a consideration which you can not
overlook. The point fixed in their charter, which they must reach before
they assume their westward course, is North Georgetown, in Columbiana
county. This point is but a few miles south of the south boundary of the
Western Reserve. And no one who has paid the least attention to the
subject will estimate the average duration of snow, one year with another,
at a depth of from six inches to two feet, at less than thirty days longer in
each year than you have at Pittsburg, or we at Steubenville. It traverses
the state on very nearly the same parallel of latitude. It was with an air of
triumph that Colonel Roberts exclaimed, ‘and to Mansfield, one hundred and
fifty-eight miles, without the obstruction of the Ohio!’ But may we not add,
one hundred and fifty-eight miles, through frequent snowdrifts? What trav-
eler on the route in the wintertime would not exclaim, with us, ‘What
folly !’ ”
But upon this line the road was finally constructed. And as a basis
upon which to establish a credit to warrant the beginning of the work, five
thousand dollars a mile was to be subscribed in each of the counties in Ohio,
and six hundred thousand dollars in Pittsburg and Allegheny City.
This from Wayne county was allotted to Mr. Larwill, who was assisted
by James Jacobs, Dr. S. F. Day, Samuel Knepper, John K. McBride, Smith
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Orr, John P. Jeffries and J. R. Straughan. The whole of the winter of
1848-49 was occupied in making speeches and rousing the people to a sense
of their duty, for the gross sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
looked as large as a half million dollars would to people today. Logic, en-
treaty and all else were employed to raise this sum of money in pledges, but
with final success.
Great as was the labor and consumption of time required in Ohio to
secure this subscription, it was accomplished before that in Pittsburg and Al-
legheny City had begun. They were waiting for a better time in money mat-
ters, and listening to the snow-drift arguments of enemies. And certainly
there were danger and doubt as to the subscription which could not be can-
celled from the masses. Friends wore anxious faces, enemies and croakers
again came forth exultant, with their opposition.
The board was called again to meet at Pittsburg, April 23, 1849, which
was attended by the Ohio members with the avowed determination to have
these cities come up to their subscription at once or they would return home
and give up all further effort. To some of the Pittsburg people this seemed
rash, but the circumstances demanded it, while the result vindicated the wis-
dom of it.
But this, like all vast projects, had to be overcome by the greater minds
and more strenuous labor. The Pittsburg directors argued the inauspicious
times, the collapse of their city scrip, the dull trade from down the rivers,
and many of the prominent citizens were induced to confirm their arguments,
they finally refusing their co-operation in an effort so useless, in their own
judgment.
Many narrow escapes did this company encounter. Men like General
Moorehead, Joshua Hanna and the like, who were not friendly to Colonel
Robinson, president of the company, becoming acquainted, through Mr. Lar-
will, with the vie\vs of the Ohio members and the opposition of Robinson and
his friends warmly seconded Ohio and offered to assist in canvassing the
city for stock, thus securing a large addition to the friends of the road.
At an informal meeting in the parlors of Mr. Hanna, with Moorehead
to represent Pittsburg, and only John Larwill and Jesse R. Straughan from
Ohio, this plan was devised. To get the city council of Pittsburg to vote
two hundred thousand dollars, provided Allegheny City would subscribe a
like amount. Then to get the latter city to subscribe two hundred thousand
dollars, provided the citizens of the place would subscribe two hundred thou-
sand dollars.
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To the first of these arose the united opposition of Steubenville and the
Pittsburg and Cleveland lines, both before the Board of Trade and the two
chambers of the council; but the efforts of Mr. Larwill and his newly-found
allies — Moorehead and others — not only surprised but defeated their well-
drilled forces; the subscription carried. It also carried in Allegheny City.
The most doubtful part was yet to come, — that coming from individuals.
The Ohio delegation had returned home, leaving only Mr. Larwill and
Mr. Straughan to remain in fulfillment of the promise — or threat — not to
return home until Pittsburg had made up its subscription. This was con-
ducted as it had been in Ohio. The citizens of Pittsburg called a meeting
of the Board of Trade, to hear the reports of a number of men from Ohio
as to the progress of the undertaking. Among those present was the dis-
tinguished senator from Missouri, Col. Thomas H. Benton, who delivered,
as the Pittsburg Chronicle said, “a beautiful address.” Mr. Larwill from
Wayne county took the lead and spoke in part as follows:
“They had already gotten subscriptions and stock sufficient taken to
justify them in going immediately to work. They of Ohio did not wish
Pennsylvania to subscribe their money for the purpose of building the road
in Ohio — all they asked was to build the road which passed through their own
state, and that being done, Ohio was ready to complete the whole of her
share. Unless this was done, Ohio would be under the necessity of seeking
some other outlet for her products and investments for her capital. In
Wayne county alone they had gotten an individual subscription of over one
hundred thousand dollars, and with these facts they were anxious to return
home and tell their stockholders and subscribers that Pittsburg was ready.
In Ohio the people were perfectly convinced, not only of the feasibility
of this route, but also of its superior advantages over all other roads of
conveyance, as well as its profitableness as an investment of capital. It
was for Pittsburg to look to her o\vn interests now. Ohio must move on,
in one way or another, and if Pittsburg did not meet them, they would in
all probability join with the Baltimore & Ohio line.”
Committees now began to canvass every ward in both cities and worked
with a right good will for several days, reporting at headquarters every
evening. The two hundred thousand dollars was reached, but the canvass-
ing was continued until two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars was
obtained. This news was telegraphed to all points in Ohio, and general joy
prevailed.
It was the birthday of the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago railway.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
In both city and country the meed of praise was awarded Mr. Larwill. Col-
onel Sloane, Samuel Hemphill, Thomas Robinson, Doctor Day, James Jacobs,
David Robinson, Judge Orr and many others energetically identified with
the undertaking have long since gone the way of all the earth, but their
united efforts in behalf of this great railway building enterprise through
Wayne county and Ohio will not soon be forgotten by the men who live
and move in the busy marts of trade and commerce, as well as the tens of
thousands of farmers whom it has benefited.
The arrival of the first passenger train at Wooster, Tuesday afternoon,
August io, 1852, was an event not soon to pass from the minds of those
who witnessed the scene. Wooster was all aglow and bestirred itself. A
national salute was fired at sunrise. Four o’clock in the afternoon was the
hour set for the arrival of the train. At two P. M. the surging multitude
began to pour in and gather at the depot, and by three o’clock it was esti-
mated that from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand persons were lined up
along the grounds and track. At three o’clock a dispatch was received from
Massillon assuring us that two trains were coming with six hundred passen-
gers, five hundred of whom were invited guests from Pittsburg and Alle-
gheny City. At ten minutes past four o’clock the train arrived. The scene
was magnificent; the people shouted, cannons boomed thunderingly, whirl-
winds of gladness swept over acres of clapping hands, and on faces young
and aged — it was the pentecost of gayety. The fire companies never looked
or behaved better; the martial music was inspiring and heroic, and the
guests were happy, both by choice and compulsion.
Processions were formed under direction of Col. R. K. Porter and J. H.
Kauke, marshals of the day, and proceeded to the grove northeast of the
depot, where a table had been spread by H. Howard, Esq., of the American
House. The festal arrangements exhibited taste to perfection. The guests
being seated. Judge Dean called for order, when they were welcomed by
him, in an appropriate speech. General Robinson, president of the road,
delivered an address, when they all sat down to a sumptuous dinner.
The guests being entertained and supplied, the cloth was removed, and
S. Hemphill. Esq., read a series of toasts, to which response was made.
The fourth toast read as follows : “Hon. John Larwill, resident director
of the Ohio & Pennsylvania railroad. The celebration today, and the re-
peated election to his present post, as director, are the bes* tributes that can
be offered to his merits as an officer and a man.”
Mr. Larwill returned his thanks for the flattering expression of appro-
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bation by his fellow-townsmen and the gentlemen present. The opening of
the road was to him a most gratifying event in his life. He had known
Wooster from the day the first stick of timber was cut to that very hour.
That had been to him a proud day and he was most happy to enjoy it and
to meet his friends which he numbered by the one word — legion.
At night the fire companies made a splendid parade, the engines drawn
by evenly-matched horses, with flowers, plumes and floating banners. Dur-
ing that evening there was a gorgeous display of fireworks. George W.
Kauffman sent up a balloon. The firemen of Pittsburg were the invited
guests of the Wooster companies at an elegant repast, served in their honor
at the United States Hall. The fact that Wooster had won and secured a
railroad had been accomplished.
OTHER RAILROADS OF WAYNE COUNTY.
By 1878 the county had secured the following railroads: The Colum-
bus, Mt. Vernon & Cleveland line; the Atlantic & Great Western line and
the Tuscarawas Valley line. In 19C9 the names (as now known) of the
various railways that cross some part of Wayne county are as follows: The
Pennsylvania (old Pittsburg & Ft. Wayne route), the Wheeling & Lake Erie
route; the Baltimore & Ohio line; the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus line,
and the one running from Ashland southeast, through the southeastern town-
ship of Wayne county.
The interurban line, known as the Cleveland & Southwestern line, an
electric railway running direct from Wooster to Cleveland, through Creston,
in Canaan township, was built in 1901-02.
With these various roads and systems of great transportation companies,
the populace have but little to complain of in way of being able to get to
and from almost any desired point. Passenger and freight rates are indeed
reasonable. Train service is most excellent and the people have much to
thank the founders of these various railways for. Still the croakers are not
all dead yet!
NAVIGATING THE KILLBUCK AND SALT CREEK.
The subjoined was a reminiscence furnished by Nathan W. Smith, of
Wooster, for Douglas’ History of Wayne County (1878) :
“In 1812 Philip Smith despatched a boat load of goods up these streams
from the Ohio river, with his sons, George and Philip, and James Mclntire
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in charge. The boat was a ‘dug-out; sixty-eight feet long by almost four
feet in width, carved out of one solid log. It was constructed several miles
up Cross creek, in Ohio, where it was launched and passed down the river
to within three miles of Wellsville; Here the cargo was placed on board,
consisting of four wagon loads full of goods, and on March 20, 1812, they
embarked on the trip for the then far-distant Wayne county. They moved
down the Ohio to the Muskingum, and up that stream and its branches to
the mouth of Killbuck creek; thence up that stream to the mouth of Salt
Creek, near Holmesville; thence to a point above Holmesville, where the
goods were unloaded at Morgan’s residence, at the Big Spring.
“About one month was occupied in making this passage. This was the
first craft that had navigated the Killbuck, which passage was accomplished
with great difficulty, as they frequently had to cut their way through drift-
wood!”
A REMINISCENCE.
The following was written in 1872, by Frederick Ley da, a pioneer of
Wayne county, then residing in Minnesota, and was published in the Wooster
Republican :
“Great things transpired during 1816. Killbuck, the beautiful, that
flows so rapidly west of Wooster and winds its way so majestically south
until it mingles its waters with the great Father of Waters, was this year
declared navigable, and it was not thought improbable that the day would
come when the ‘Mohicans’ would lie conveyed to the Killbuck bridge, and
Wooster become the head of navigation. Owing to the great navigation to
this part, grain became scarce and the demand increased. A benevolent spirit
entered the heart of John Wilson to seek food for man and beast, and it was
on this wise : He laid the matter before one William Totten, who had been
a man of renown among the watermen of the Ohio in days of yore. William
thought it good to go and choose some of the more valiant men to accom-
pany him. It occurred to him that in the White Woman’s country there
was much corn and to spare, and the captain of this boat led the way to
that land where the corn grew, and he procured a craft called a ‘keel-boat.’
The size of this boat was fifteen feet in length, the width ten feet and its
depth six feet, with a cabin thereon. All things now ready, the captain went
forth among the inhabitants of this land of corn, and laid bare the wants
of his brethren that dwelt north, even toward the lakes, and after they heark-
ened unto his voice their hearts softened toward their kinsmen and they said
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unto him : Thou hast come unto thy brethren of the south to get provender
for man and beast, and thou shalt not surely go away empty, for we have
here an abundance and to spare.' The captain answered and said: ‘We
have not come here, my brethren, to ask alms, for we have the coin to
satisfy thee. What wilt thou tax us for the provender? Ho'w much per
bushel?' Then the brethren to the south answered and said: Truly, we
are in need of the coin, for we have not seen the like before in this land. Ye
shall surely have it at fifteen cents per bushel.' So it was agreed that the
boat should be filled, and it was even so. The captain called forth his men
and said unto them: ‘Up, we will haste to our brethren with the corn, that
they faint not.' The craft was pushed up the stream in this way: On the
other side of the cabin there was a footway with slats nailed on from bow
to stern cross-wise. Men on each side, with poles, commenced at the bow,
placed one end of the pole to their shoulder and the other end in the stream,
then pushed, and as the boat ran ahead they kept stepping until they reached
the stern; then wheeled, walked back and did the same over again, one man
remaining at the helm to steer. They succeeded, but with much difficulty,
having to cut drift-wood and trees that fell across the stream; often only
two miles a day were made. They finally landed the boat above the Killbuck
bridge, south. It was then noised abroad that the effort was a success, and
great \vas the rejoicing. The occasion was celebrated in the partaking of the
‘ardent.' The writer of this was considered competent to take charge of
said boat and contents during the night, and as the shades of evening drew
near there came forth from their hiding places a numerous quantity of mos-
quitoes— the number no mortal man could tell — and if anybody ever did
suffer from these little Killbuck imps it was me. Having nothing to make a
smoke with, I was completely at their mercy. The corn was hauled to the
town and disposed of at one dollar and fifty cents per bushel.
“Joseph McGugan bought the boat, ran it down and \vas about to load it
when the rains descended, the floods came and that boat, with the men on
board, broke its moorings and was carried off. The men got hold of limbs,
climbed up the trees and were there thirty-six hours before they were released.
Thus ended the corn speculation.
“During the next season a load of salt arrived from the Ohio river,
which was disposed of at twelve dollars a barrel, and Killbuck was declared
navigable.
“I was somewhat acquainted with the old chief Killbuck, and he occa-
sionally visited Wooster, always accompanied by his daughter, quite an
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interesting girl. The stream was named for this chief. He was a beautiful
specimen of the red man as taught and trained by the white men — a perfect
bloat — and as homely as the devil, lacking the cloven foot. Killbuck, you are
not responsible for being named after the old chief! Nor yet for your slug-
gishness, nor for your slopping over occasionally to afford a good ‘skating
park’ for young Wooster! Thou wast here, winding thy unrippled way,
carrying off the noxious effluvia and draining the low, rich lands along
thy borders for the husbandmen that are to cultivate that ‘Nile/ as yet un-
touched by man. Proud mortals may stand on thy banks and cast a reproach-
ful eye or an epithet on thy appearance, and say, Why was it not thus
and so? Ah! has man filled the great object of his existence? Nay, verily,
but thou hast.”
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CHAPTER XIX.
TOWNSHIP HISTORY.
Wayne county is subdivided into sixteen townships, and the following is
a historical sketch of each:
CHIPPEWA TOWNSHIP.
This township was organized September 4, 1815, and is situated in
the extreme northeastern portion of the county, with Medina county on its
north, Summit county on the east, Baughman township, Wayne county, on
the south, and Milton township on its western border. It contains thirty-six
full sections of land, much of wrhich is underlaid with coal, of which further
mention will be made.
The first to effect a settlement in Chippewa township were Nicholas
and Adam Helmick, Henry Franks, Sr., Uriah, Henry and John Franks,
Thomas Fredericks, Henry Houts, Michael Brouse, Paul Baughman, Jacob
Hatfield, William Hatfield, John Reichildifer, Stephen Fisher, Joseph
Springer, Mr. McConkey, John Adams, William Doyle, Frederick Gale-
house, Isaac Montgomery, Michael Huffman, James and Adam Shatto, Rev.
George Weygandt, George Christian, the Whitmans, Michael Feister,
Samuel Pierpont, M. D., John Rouston, James Boak, “Major” South, James
Hutchinson, Peter Bradenbaugh, Jacob Heffleman and some others whose
names are now unknown in the records of this part of Wayne county.
Michael Basinger came to the township in 1815. Pioneer Hatfield is the
authority for the statement that Rogue’s Hollow was named by a Doctor
Crosby, who owned the ground and had it laid out. Daniel Slanker built
the first mill, a grist mill of the early-day type, and to it was also attached
a saw mill ; it was west of Doylestown. Mike Greenoe had the first, Fred
Galehouse the second and after them George Wellhouse and Michael Brouse
had distilleries. The first graveyard was at Easton, and Lucindia Heckerton
was the first person to be buried there. Jonathan Coleman of Canton, a
married man, was drowned in Donor’s lake in 1830.
(-23)
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Henry Franks, a settler of 1816, was born in Fayette county, Pennsyl-
vania, and settled south of Doylestown. Henry Franks, known as “Old
Henry,” with some others, was taken prisoner on the Ohio river by the
Indians when he was a young man, and held in captivity by them. He was
tall, straight and powerfully built. His captors immediately fancied him
and by ceremonies introduced him to Indian citizenship. Its first condition
was to run the gauntlet, and at the end of the race he was, to save his life,
forced to strike an Indian with his hatchet, whom he nearly killed. This
successful and daring act on his part ingratiated him with his captors, who
exclaimed, “He make good Indian.” Mr. Franks receiving a wound in the
test of his manhood, the Indians instantly took charge of him, nursing and
treating him kindly until he thoroughly recovered. After the capture of
Crawford in Ohio, and during the excitement of his horrible death, all of
which Mr. Franks witnessed, he made an effort to escape, in which he was
successful. He fled to the lake shore, boarded a British vessel, went by
water as far as Montreal, crossed to the American side, and thence on foot
to Philadelphia. From the last city he wended his way to Pittsburg, and
thence on to his home in Fayette county, Pennsylvania, after a captivity of
five years.
Frederick Galehouse, one of the pioneers of the township, a German by
birth, emigrated to America in 1786, going first to Cumberland county,
Pennsylvania, settling in Chippewa township, this county, in 1823. He re-
sided in Wayne county thirty years, removing to Doylestown, where he died
in 1865. His oldest son, Frederick Galehouse, born in New Lisbon, came
to Wayne county with his father and was brutally murdered by a Canadian
named Amos Clark, who struck him down with a poker, in January, 1840.
The father, Frederick, had a contract with the government to superintend
the construction of a public road from New Lisbon to Lake Erie for the
use of artillery, and when the news of Hull's surrender came, he told all to
scatter, which they did.
The village of Chippewa was surveyed for Stephen Ford by Daniel
McClure in the month of May, 1816. Capt. John Rouston erected the first
house in the place.
The village of Slangerville was laid out by Jacob Slanker, Reuben
Dressier and John Gartner in February, 1843. This place, since the com-
pletion of the railroad, is known as Easton.
Doylestown, the chief place of the township for many years, was platted
by William Doyle, December 9, 1827. August 6, 1867, the place was in-
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corporated. The first house in the village was a log structure built by Wil-
liam Doyle, and in it Doyle conducted a tavern, sold whisky and permitted
many dances to be held there. The first physician of the place was Doctor
Pierrepont. who, while on a visit East, stole a horse and for the crime was sent
to the penitentiary. The first election for the Doylestown incorporation was
held in December, 1866. The first officers elected were: Mayor, A. H. Pur-
sell; recorder, William Reed; treasurer, Samuel H. Miller; councilmen,
Elias Galehouse, James H. Seiberling, Henry A. Soliday, Jacob Shaffer and
R. B. Wasson.
Doylestown was supplied with a newspaper by George W. Everts in
1874, when, on July nth, he issued the first number of the Doylestown
Journal.
William G. Fpster served as postmaster at this village from 1828 to
1847.
Among the enterprising spirits of Doylestown was Elias Galehouse, who
in his young manhood established a hotel at Doylestown, continued propri-
etor for eight years, then engaged in the general merchandise business ; built
a foundry, in company with John Gates, and made stoves, plows and other
farm implements; also run a carriage manufactory at the same time. Sub-
sequently, he went into the coal mining industry and built a grist- and saw-
mill in Doylestown.
Doylestown has been the seat of several useful and successful factories,
including that of reaping and mowing machinery. In the early days of such
machinery, 1861, Peter Cline, John F. Seiberling and John H. Hower formed
a partnership to manufacture what was known as the “Excelsior” dropping
reaper and mower, of which John F. Seiberling was the inventor. The works
were enlarged from time to time until 1865 and others were associated with
the works. A part of the plant was moved to Akron and a part was still
conducted at Doylestown. From 1865 to 1875 the annual output of these
machines was about nine hundred. After 1875 they built a new design of
machine known as the “Empire” reaper and mower, invented by the same
Mr. Seiberling. One factory was maintained at Doylestown and another at
Akron. Of this plant the local writer of 1878 had this to say: “This firm
at Doylestown is the most solid and reliable manufacturing institution in
Wayne county, or in northern Ohio. It has thus far weathered financial cy-
clones, monetary upheavals, and panic simoons, its reputation unquestioned
and its credit above challenge or suspicion. It employs about seventy-five
workmen in its works.”
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
The population of Chippewa township in 1900 was two thousand nine
hundred and thirty-seven.
The coal mining interests of this township have been very extensive and
valuable. This coal measure is located in the northern, eastern and central
parts of the county, north of Chippewa creek, but this mineral wealth is
found here and there throughout the township. It is of the bituminous, best
quality type, such as the Mahoning and Briar Hill grade. More concerning
these mines will be found elsewhere in this work in the Geological chapter.
MILTON TOWNSHIP.
Milton township is the second from the eastern line of Wayne county
and in the north tier of townships. It is six miles square. It dates its
organization by the commissioners in session October 5, 1818. One of the
early pioneers, Jacob Kiefer, went to Wooster to see about having it named,
and suggested to the board of county commissioners that it be styled “Center
Swamp township,' ” from the fact that there was a large swamp in the center
of its territory. Commissioner George Bair objected to this name, saying
it would induce odium upon the township, whereupon, at the suggestion of
Mr. Bair, it was called Milton township. In 1870 the population of this
township had reached one thousand five hundred and twenty-four; in the
federal census of 1900 it was given as one thousand nine hundred and seventy-
eight.
The first to settle in the township, with a view of making a permanent
home, was Isaac DeCourcey, perceptibly of Indian blood, who, with his
wife and two children, was living on the Knupp farm as early as 1813.
After about eight years’ residence in the townshp he moved to Allen county.
While he was styled a farmer, he devoted most of his time to hunting, fish-
ing and trapping.
Among the first events of importance, may here be narrated the fol-
lowing: The first deaths were those of Sarah Fritz and her young son.
Adam Fritz, who died and were buried in the Knupp graveyard in 1817.
The third person to die in the township was David Trump. The first school
was taught by William Dovle, who taught in a log cabin in 1817; the build-
ing stood where later the Knupp church was erected. This school building
was twenty by twenty-four feet, built of round logs scutched inside. It was
so cold that in the winter time ink would freeze in the bottles while a pupil
was in the act of writing. It was a subscription school, this being ahead of
the free, common school system.
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The first church building in the township was the Lancetown Baptist
church, the pioneer ministers being Elder Freeman and James Newton. Free-
man was a Revolutionary soldier, and a missionary, conducting services at
private houses usually. Newton, however, was the first regular ordained
preacher in the township.
The first saw and grist-mills were built by Thomas Huffstetter on the
Little Chippewa. The next mill was built by Philip Fritz on the river Styx.
The pioneer doctor was a Mr. Donahue, who was also a tailor by trade,
and practiced medicine as well as tailoring.
William Doyle, founder of Doylestown, was the first justice of the peace
in Milton township, and the second was John Dawson, the commissions of
both bearing date of April 27, 1819.
The first distilleries were the property of Messrs. Hartshorn, Gilmore
and John Lance.
The first postoffice was at Christian Krupp’s place, and was called New
Prospect.
The earliest election was held at William Doyle’s. At the first election,
old Mr. Trump had to be carried to the polls to make a necessary number to
hold the election.
Among the early settlers may be named Martin Fritz, Christian Lance,
John, William, James and Henry Lance, Andrew Waggoner, Thomas Daw-
son, Abner Johnson, Samuel Slemmons and others who came into the town-
ship about the same time.
More than a passing mention should be made of Martin Fritz, who was
born in Alsace in 1757, and emigrated from France in 1771. Not having
the necessary funds to pay his passage, he was sold, according to the old
custom, to a Mr. Ray, for whom he worked three years for the payment of
the debt. Soon after he had served his time the Revolutionary war broke
out and he enlisted under Washington for five years, being engaged in several
battles, including Brandywine. After the war he married in Cumberland
county, Pennsylvania, and moved to Venango county, and from there removed
to Milton township, this county, in June, 1814, when there was but one other
settler within the township, the quarter-breed DeCourcey. He died, aged
ninety-four years, in 1851. His son Philip, bom in 1804, had lived longer
in Milton township, in 1878, than any other man within its borders.
The towns of Milton township are : Johnson’s Comers, called Amwell,
named for Abner Johnson, who made the first improvements in it. John
Scoby, of Truxton, New York, was the pioneer doctor, and Goodsill Foster
was the first postmaster. Adney Bessev named the town Amwell.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Russell was named after the Russells of Massillon, who purchased the
property there and gave it the name. A postoffice was established there at
an early day, but its name was Amwell.
Milton Station began as a town in 1869 when the first house was erected
by David Shook. In July, 1870, C. M. Murdock started the first business,
and in the same year the postoffice was removed here from Shinersburg
(New Prospect).
Shinersburg was named after this manner : Michael Hatfield bought the
first lot there from Philip Fritz, and built a house on it, and started a grocery
store, selling drugs, beer, whisky, etc. One day Michael got drunk and in
one of his ecstatic moods was heard saying, “When I get to heaven I will
shine as bright as anybody” ; hence the name Shinersburg.
Lancetown, called after the large family of Lances, has long since been
defunct.
The present towns of the township are Sterling and Ritman, in the
northern part. Ritman has a savings bank, with S. M. Brenneman presi-
dent, with a capital of fifty thousand dollars.
Sterling is a good town, with the Farmers Banking Company, with D. I.
Simmons as president and S. A. Simmons as cashier.
FATAL BOILER EXPLOSION.
A fatal boiler explosion occurred March 11, 1870. in Milton township.
It was a steam boiler in the saw-mill near Shinersburg and it resulted in the
death of seven men. On the day of the explosion the mill was being operated
by Jacob Knupp, John Fritz, Lewis Hoover and David, his brother. Robert
McConnell and son, Frank, and David Shook were at work on a house as
carpenters a few rods west of the mill and, a rain coming on, they sought
shelter in the mill. In ten minutes after they reached the mill the boiler ex-
ploded and all were instantly killed, except David Hoover, who lingered a few
hours.
A REMINISCENCE BY PHILIP FRITZ.
“When my father removed to Milton township, in 1814, he had to cut
out the road where I now live [written in 1878]. Bears, wolves, wildcats,
porcupines, wild hogs, deer and turkey were plenty. We often shot the wild
hogs, as they made good meat. Porcupines were numerous ; the dogs would
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attack them and we would pull out the quills with bullet-moulds. We made
sugar by the barrel in our camp, took it to Canton and sold it. The wolves
on one occasion chased us all out of the sugar camp. Times looked pretty
blue when we came here to Milton township. We had to go fourteen miles
to Rex’s mill to get grinding done. I helped to grub out the land on which
Knupp’s cemetery is located. In the early days I hunted a good deal, and
often with the Indians. They would come to our house and get corn, and
bring venison to exchange for it. They weighed it themselves, the corn in
one hand and the venison in the other.
“Samuel and John Fritz, Isaac DeCourcey, John Huffman and myself
went up the country to Chippewa lake to hunt, and took our provisions with
us. I was left in charge of the eatables, and the balance went to the woods to
hunt. While I was watching the provisions eight Indians approached me,
and I was terribly frightened. They at once commenced laying off their
knives, guns and tomahawks, and advancing to where I had a large fire built,
one of them would speak in English, saying, ‘White man foolish; makes big
fire and sits away off ; Indian makes little fire and sits up close.’ They then
went to the edge of the lake and began jumping on the muskrat houses, and
just as fast as the inmates popped out they popped him over, and so they kept
on until out of one of the largest mud-houses sprang a beaver, which was
instantly killed, and then they whooped and danced and drank. Its hide was
worth sixteen dollars. When our hunting party came in the Indians wanted
to buy their dogs. An Indian squaw went into a marsh to pick cranberries.
She had her papoose with her and, tying it to a board, set it down. While
she was in the marsh a dog came along and killed it. She lamented and
yelled fearfully. When we came here there were a good many Indians about
here — they called themselves the Delawares, Shawnees and Wyandots. They
had quite a town on the south side of Chippewa lake, probably thirty fam-
ilies. I used to go the settlement often, saw the little Indian boys roasting
gammons of meat and gnaw at them; saw them shoot pieces of silver out of
split sticks, with bows and arrows, and never miss. They captured a good
deal of wild honey and carried it in deer skins turned inside out. They would
cut down a tree, carve out the stump, crush their corn in it, and then put it
in pots and boil it, and then put in the meat. An Indian never uses salt.
Within about ten rods of where river Styx — north branch of the Chippewa —
empties into Big Chippewa, an Indian was found dead in the drift, shot
through the waist, and it seems about that time the Indians got scared and
very suddenly disappeared.” — From Douglas history , published in 1878.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
CANAAN TOWNSHIP.
In the northern tier of townships, and the second from the western line
of the county, is Canaan, the territory of which is six miles square. It was
organized May 5, 1819, and was named by Dr. Isaac Barnes. In 1870 it had
a population of almost two thousand people. According to the United States
census in 1900 it had two thousand four hundred and one people.
About thirty years ago, the following reminiscence was written by Isaac
Notestine, and as it brings out so many early-day points connected with the
history of this township, it is here reproduced :
“By whom or when the first entries of land were made in this township
is not known; but perhaps in 1808. The first settlement was made and a
cabin built in 1812 by William Ewing, Sr., on the farm later owned by his
son Simon. About the same time James Rose, a Scotchman, and Thomas
Armstrong settled in the township. Joseph Stratton settled in 1817 on the
farm owned by his son Daniel and about this period the Weed brothers,
Joshua and William, and Thomas Thrapp came in. Then Daniel Blocher
and Swartz and Nathan Hall. Quite a number of families were now located.
“In the fall of 1819, the first election was held in an ashery that stood
nearly a mile south of the present village of Windsor. The electors as given
by George Sommers, a citizen, but not a voter then, were William Ewing, Sr.,
William Ewing, Jr., Thomas Armstrong, Joseph and Daniel Stratton, Elizier
Perago, Nathan Hall, David Plumer, Doctor Barnes. Chapman, Daniel
Blocher, Swartz, John Templeton, James Rose, Jones, B. F. Miller, James
Buchanan. Joshua and William Reed, Thomas Thrapp, and one Adams, all
of whom are dead. The officers elected were: Justices. Doctor Barnes and
Joseph Stratton; trustees, Doctor Barnes, Joseph Stratton. Thomas Thrapp;
clerk, Nathan Hall, who held the office afterwards some twelve years; other
officers not remembered.
“Immigration now became more rapid, so then in ten years from the
organization of the township at lenst one-half of the rjuarter sections that
could be farmed had on them one or more cabins. In the year of the organ-
ization George Sommers settled in the township, the only resident of that
time. About the same time John Mclllvaine and James Smith moved in,
settling near each other, a mile west of Jackson. Soon after Daniel Oiler.
Henry Kopp, Simon Kenney, James and William Haskins and Enoch Gil-
bert and a number of others from the New England states and New York
came ir.
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“Charles, son of James Rose, was the first white child bom in the town-
ship. Simon, son of William Ewing, Sr., was the second and still lived on
the old homestead in 1878. The oldest native Canaanite is the last named.
Susan, daughter of William Ewing, Sr., is supposed to have been the first
person married in the township to her first husband, Ramsey, who was killed
at a mill raising, near Wooster. The first school house was on James Rose's
land, in which James Buchanan, a Scotchman, taught the first school.
“Almost every family, men and women, wore homespun, at home and
abroad. The only difference between the dress to ‘go to meetin’ ’ and that
of the field or the clearing, was in being fresh washed for the former. The
diet, too, was of the plainest kind, quite limited in variety, and frequently
also in quantity. Corn, in its various forms, whole or ground, with buck-
wheat, potatoes, beans, pork, venison and other wild meats, weie the chief
articles of food. Game abounded, and many families depended upon getting
their meats from the forest. Though the pioneers could get but little for the
wheat they sold, the articles they bought cost much more than at present.
As late as 1825 salt sold for eleven dollars per barrel, and before cost still
more.
“If the times of settlements were recorded by decades, from the first
coming of William Ewing, in 1812, the first up to 1822, would find from
twenty-five to thirty families in the township. And this may be called the true
pioneer decade; whilst the next to 1832, would be of immigration, which dur-
ing this time poured in in streams, so that by 1832, of land suitable for occu-
pation, not more than twenty-five quarters were unoccupied. During this
second decade came many of the most useful and substantial citizens, among
them mechanics and men of capital. Some of those who came during this
period were, as remembered, John and Justin Miles, Smith and David Hois-
ington, Simon Kenney, and the Shanklings, Joseph Notestine, Henry Shuff-
ling, John D. Hockert, David Wiles, John and Henry and Daniel Frank,
Jason and Sylvanus Jones, Zenas Z. Crane, Joseph Henry and Jacob Zarer,
the Wells and many others equally prominent, whose names do not now come
to mind. At the close of the second decade, the last entry of the public land
was made in this township. Among the men last named was John Kearns,
a man of sterling worth, industrious, skillful and of much business ability.
He settled a mile north of the Center, on the present Henry Smith farm. He
was an ardent supporter of the church in general, and of his own, the Meth-
odist Episcopal, in particular. At his death, in 1839, he was one of the
wealthiest men in his township.
“Wooster was the nearest point of trade, but it was a poor place to sell
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products of any kind. Wheat and flour were often hauled to Cleveland, and
hogs were driven there, as the nearest market.
“There are five villages in the township, Burbank, Golden Comers, Wind-
sor (or Canaan Center), Jackson and Pike.”
Of the educational features of this township, it may be stated that one
of the first institutions of learning in Wayne county was Canaan Academy,
located at Windsor, this township. The original building was a structure of
frame, thirty-six by forty-eight feet, erected in 1842 by a stock company.
This academy was controlled by a board of directors, the first board of which
consisted of John Paul. M. D., Jonas Notestine. Justine Mills, Harvey Rice
and Alfred Hotchkiss. The school was first opened December 3, 1843, with
forty-seven pupils, under the instruction of Prof. C. C. Bomberger, A. B.,
who taught three years. Reverends Barr and Barker had charge during the
summer of 1847; succeeded in the winters of 1847 an<3 1848 by Prof. Isaac
Notestine, who, with short intervals, remained in charge until 1863. After
that year the school was taught by a number of professors until 1875, when
it was permanently closed, Prof. J. W. Cummings being then in charge.
While Professor Notestine was teaching, in the winter of 1851, the house
was burned, and the next building was constructed of brick. It is conceded
that Canaan Academy has been an important factor in the educational work
of Wayne and adjoining counties.
The churches of this locality are treated in the Religious chapter of
this work.
Burbank, within this township, was incorporated in 1868, when the
name was changed from Bridgeport. Burbank Academy was organized in
1873. The Methodist Episcopal church was the first to be organized in the
place. The business factors in the hamlet in 1909 were: M. W. Hower &
Son ; Will Frary, who is postmaster, George Brothers, R. L. Malcomb, J. E.
Addleman. H. A. Overs and A. Overs & Company.
CONGRESS TOWNSHIP.
Congress is the extreme northwestern sub-division in Wayne county;
is south of the line of Wayne and Medina county, west of Canaan township,
north of Chester township and borders on the Ashland county line. Wayne
township was organized October 5, 1818. Hon. Michael Totten and James
Carlin gave the following concerning the settlement of this part of the
county :
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In 1815, the first families moved into what is now Congress township.
Sometime during the first week of February, Michael and Henry Totten, ac-
companied by George and Isaac Poe, cut a trail from Wooster to where the
village of Congress stands, which at that time, was all forest, the lands not yet
having been entered. These gentlemen camped until they finished their cabin
on section 27. Mrs. Catherine Totten was the first white woman in the
township. The first furniture within the township was drawn on a sled
from Wooster by the Totten boys, in February, 1815. The first week in the
following April, George and Isaac Poe and a few other families came in and
settled upon the same section. Peter Warner and family moved into the
southwest part of the township that spring. In 1816 Matthew Brower and
James Carlin, with their families, moved onto the same farm, where they
spent the remainder of their lives. The next to invade this fair domain was
George Aukerman and John Nead, with their families. After this period
emigrants came from different sections of the country and settled the town-
ship in various sections. The first white person who died in Congress town-
ship was Mrs. Amasa Warner, and the second was Mrs. Totten.
The first school was taught by John Totten in the first cabin built.
George Poe was the first justice of the peace. The first school house
was erected in 1819, on the southwest quarter of section 27. The first clear-
ing was made by the Tottens and consisted of five acres, which was planted
to corn and cut in the autumn for fodder purposes, and the same fall winter
wheat was sowed on the land, these crops being the first corn and wheat
grown within Congress township. Game was very plentiful, and for some
time after the arrival of the first families was the chief article of diet. Hogs
and sheep could not at first be raised, on account of the wolves that would
devour such animals at sight. One early-day winter the first settlers — the
Tottens — had twelve sheep enclosed in the same lot with the cabin, and they
were believed to be safe there, but one night a pack of wolves assailed the pen
and killed all of them but two and one of these escaped and ran into the house,
awoke the family, but the hungry wolves had finished their work and fled
for the woods. The next day one of the Tottens pursued them as far as the
Harrisville swamp, in Medina county, but got no opportunity of shooting
at them. Near the swamp was a camp of Indians, numbering about thirty
or possibly forty.
Among the earliest settlers in Congress township may be recalled : John
Jeffrey, Walter Elgin, David Gardner, Jacob Holmes, Jacob Shellebarger,
Peter and Samuel Chasey, G. W. Howey, David Nelson, James Grimes’ father,
James Boyd, Hector Burns, Samuel Sheets, N. N. Perrine, A. Yocum, John
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Vanasdoll, Rev. John Hazzard and family, Isaac Matthews and others whose
names have slipped from memory.
James Carlin is the authority for the statement that the first marriage
in Congress township was that of Jesse Matteson and Eleanor Carlin. The
first sermon was preached by a Presbyterian minister, named Matthews, who
spoke with a sword girded to his body. The first grist-mill was built by
Naftzger, where a man named Buchanan was killed, waiting for his grist.
The earliest doctor in the township was Mr. Mills, while the first carpenter
was Jacob Matthews.
Royce Summerton, away back in the seventies, gave the following rem-
iniscence on Congress township in early times when his father was numbered
among the pioneer settlers :
“When father and his family moved into the county there were but five
neighbors within a radius of several miles. Isaac Matthews came as early
as 1814, and the Poes were here and Peter Chasey and his son, Samuel. On
one occasion, when father and I were coming home from Naftzger’s mill
with the wagon drawn by two oxen and a horse hitched on in front, I mounted
on the horse, the wolves gathered in large numbers at our side, and I got
greatly alarmed, but father just laughed and said there was no danger. After
butchering day the wolves were very troublesome, and on one occasion a
large hog was missing for three days, when it returned mangled and fly-
blown, having been, as was supposed, attacked by a bear.
“In the early days the woods were infested with pea-vines, which crept
over the ground and would climb small shrubs and trees to the height of two
or three feet, and in the fall of the year the cattle would eat it and fatten on
it, and many of them died, and it came to be believed that it was from the
overeating of this pea-vine.
“In the first log (Methodist Episcopal) church in Congress, Harry O.
Sheldon was preaching at a quarterly meeting, and there being a large crowd
present, it was difficult for all to be seated. Joseph Ewing stood up defiantly
in the center of the room. Mr. Sheldon came back to him and asked him to be
seated, which he refused, when Sheldon caught him violently on his hip, car-
ried him out and forced him to kneel down while he prayed for him/'
The Poe family was one of much historic note, and the encounter with
Bigfoot, the noted Indian, is narrated in the Miscellaneous chapter of this
volume.
The towns and villages of Congress township are West Salem, Auker-
nian. Congress and Pleasant Home.
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Congress was originally called Waynesburg. It was platted March 6,
1827, by Philip Gates and David Newcomer, Peter Emory doing the survey-
ing. The first house in this village was built by Michael Funk and Elmer
Yocum and was situated upon the site of the present Methodist church. The
first postmaster was Jacob Hare. The pioneer physician was Doctor Mills.
George Wicks kept the first hotel and David W. Poe established the first
tannery in the village. Among the early deaths after the village was platted
was an old Indian. He and his wife were on a tramp and stopped at Griffith’s
tavern, where they got tight and abusive, and the landlord’s wife threw a pot
of boiling water on him, and he died.
Congress village was incorporated in 1837. The first officers were:
Mayor, John Tarr; recorder, William Rogers; councilmen, Joe Fish, John
Zuber, P. Pancost, R. Summerton and John Potts.
West Salem was platted by Peter and John Rickel, June 14, 1834. It
became an incorporated place in 1868, the first officers being: Mayor, D. H.
Ambrose; trustees, D. Eshleman, D. Gable, J. Georget, J. J. Shank, W. R.
Huber; recorder, E. Fritzinger; treasurer, John Zehner. This town is
located in the extreme northwestern part of the township and county.
In 1878 Mrs. Peter wrote the following reminiscence that now, after a
third of a century almost, is appropriate in the history of Congress town-
ship :
“It was fifty-five years ago yesterday (October 10, 1877) when Peter
and I landed here with our two children, coming from Bedford county, Penn-
sylvania, where he was a farmer. We settled in the woods near where I
now live, built a cabin with a puncheon floor and stick chimney. My first
neighbors were Rev. John Hazzard, Mr. Ford and Charles Crile. Peter,
however, had been out here two years before we moved and entered a quarter
of land on which West Salem is now largely built. There were no roads
then around here, and we had a hard time getting the two-horse wagon
through. Peter was born in Virginia, January 30, 1794, and died October
7, 1865. My maiden name was Nancy Rickel and I was born in old Lan-
caster, Pennsylvania, May 1, 1803. We had seven boys and two girls. I
used to work in the field and fainted in the field once while husking corn.
Folks had to work then indeed, and I used to help haul logs and such things,
and now would like to live again in the woods, instead of in town, for then
I could hear the wild birds sing as in the old days. John Rickel, who, with
Peter, laid out West Salem, was a brother of mine. He was a native of Lan-
caster, Pennsylvania, and came to Wayne county three years before we did,
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and some of the town is built on land he settled on at that time. John was
an Albright preacher.
“ Joseph Harbaugh put up the first house in West Salem after it was
laid out. It was an old-fashioned frame and he paid about twelve dollars for
the lot. Jacob Hyatt rented the house and died in it three months after he
moved in. James Hyatt kept tavern there afterwards and it was the first
public house in Salem. Cass and Emerson were among the first doctors.
William Cass started the first store, without any counter save a bench. He
bought eggs, butter, etc. Reverend Beer was an early preacher.”
An agricultural society was formed in West Salem in 1867, when by-
laws were adopted and first officers elected as follows: William Buchanan,
president; John Wicks, secretary; D. Eshleman, treasurer; and John Zehner,
Peter Stair and Captain Mitchell, directors.
In the village of Congress, in 1909, the following were the business fac-
tors: George W. Michael, general merchandise; C. A. Wiler, general dealer;
A. W. Mowrey, hardware and paints; Ebert & Eby, furniture and under-
taking; Bert W. Mowrey, furniture and undertaking; C. C. Fresh, hotel and
feed barn; Clemen C. Holmes, harness and shoemaking; Arthur J. Garver,
wagonmaking and blacksmithing ; Clifton Martin, hay, grain and potatoes;
Simson & Ginter, hay, grain and potatoes ; David Moser, furs, skins and pelts.
CHESTER TOWNSHIP.
Chester township is the second from the north line of Wayne county
and on the western line of the county, Ashland county, Ohio, being on its
western border. It is seven miles from east to west and six north and south.
With several other sub-divisions of the county, it was organized into a civil
township March 5, 1816. Even before its real organization, it was styled
Chestnut township, or the chestnut region, on account of its great growth of
that kind of timber. In 1870 the township had a population of one thousand
nine hundred and twenty-one. By the time the 1900 United States census
was compiled it had decreased to one thousand six hundred and forty-eight.
The earliest settlers in the township were Judge James Robinson, Samuel
Funk, Phineas Summerton, John Moyers, the Hillis boys and their mothers,
John Emory, John Lowery, the Cunninghams, Joseph Aikens, James Fulton,
Jacob Worst. Adam Rumbaugh, John, Abram and Isaac Myers, Samuel
Vanosdol, Phineas Davis, Anthony Camp, Michael Mowrey, Philip Hoff-
linger, Daniel and John Pittinger, Nathaniel Paxton, William and Hugh
Adams, Benjamin Emmons, John Campbell, Thomas Johnston, John A.
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Kelley, Abraham Ecker, Isaac White, Henry Sapp, John Hern and John
Helman. As the county is now bounded, some of these would be located in
what is now Ashland county.
Chester township has within its borders the following platted towns and
villages : Cedar Valley postoffice, Overton, New Pittsburg, West Union, or
Lattsburg.
New Pittsburg was laid out March 6, 1829, by George H. Hovey. At
this point John Hall built the first house and kept a hotel.
Lattsburg (West Union) was platted by J. W. Hoegner for Jacob Grose,
February 27, 1851. The name of the village was changed in 1855 from West
L’nion to Lattasburg, after Ephraim Latta. Here John Fesig built the first
house, a log structure on the northeast corner of the public square. He used
it for both a shop and residence. Latta bought out Fesig and began the
manufacture of hand sickles. The postoffice was established here May 14,
1867, when W. C. Baker received his first appointment, and who continued
many years as postmaster. Samuel Bridenstein started the first store in which
dry goods were carried. Henry Allspaugh was the first to practice medicine
in the town. It is claimed by old residents that the first person to die was a
woman who was buried in the middle of the road (as later surveyed out),
between Lattasburg and the German Baptist church.
Concerning the first settler in Chester township, it may be here recorded
that James Robison, brother of Thomas and David, so well known in the
city of Wooster, was born February 17, 1787, in Franklin county, Pennsyl-
vania, and in 1813 immigrated to Wayne county, Ohio, temporarily stopping
in Wooster, the same year building the saw-mill on Little Killbuck creek, in
the southwest corner of Chester township. He then became a citizen of
Chester township, three years prior to its organization. A saw-mill, in those
early days, was next in importance to a grist-mill, and hence the name of
Robison’s Mills became universally and popularly known throughout the
entire western part of Wayne county, and was for many years after its builder
had been laid away with other pioneers of the county. While the mill itself
has for more than forty years been in ruins and decay, yet the locality is often
spoken of as “Robison’s Mill.” Mr. Robison, aided by a single individual,
spent three months in digging the race for the old saw-mill. The woolen
factory, though not so ancient an institution as the mill, ranked among the
best of its kind in the county, and was built at a very early period. During
his presence in Columbiana county, in the discharge of his duties as a member
of the Ohio Legislature, it was burned, as a result of defective flues. The
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saw-mill was also swept away by the flames. On his return, without indul-
gence in any surmises or complaint, he quietly set about rebuilding the factory
and the mill. He placed in new and better machinery in both factory
and saw-mill. Before the disastrous fire, he simply carded, spun and pulled,
but after the rebuilding he made other additions and introduced the manu-
facture of yarns, blankets, cloths, etc.
Here was the waterpower, and Mr. Robison had the enterprise and intel-
ligence to utilize it, and it became not only a benefit, but a benefaction to the
whole community. He was not a visionary man, but practical, and devoted
himself to material enterprises. He had been a soldier in the war of 1812-14
and supplied the army of Gen. W. H. Harrison with provisions, at Fort
Meigs, his wagon on one instance standing in the woods loaded with flour, on
what is now known as the Robison hill, to the south of Little Killbuck.
WAYNE TOWNSHIP.
Wayne township derives its name from the county, which was named
for Gen. Anthony Wayne — “Mad Anthony.” This township is centrally lo-
cated in the county and touches the incorporate line of the city of Wooster,
the seat of justice. It is a full congressional township, six miles square. It
dates its organization from October 12, 1816, and in 1870 had reached a pop-
ulation numbering one thousand seven hundred and fourteen. Its popula-
tion according to the federal census of 1900 was one thousand seven hundred
and eleven.
The first white man to settle within the limits of this township was
among the following, but it is not certain who did actually effect the first
clearing. The first pioneer band was as follows : James Glass, the Roses,
the Feazles, the Clarks, Meeks, Turners, Thomas Armstrong, Moses Thomp-
son, Thomas Pomeroy, Henry Perrine, George Gibson, Ralph Cherry, John
and Peter Vanostran, Fred Garver, Armstrong Davison, John Richey, John
and Peter Bacher, Thomas Beall, Peter Anspaugh, Peter Eiker, George Bair,
Henry Snyder, Peter and Jacob Ihrig. William Elgin, Mordecai Boon, Peter
Everly, Jacob Seiford, Benjamin Miller, Abraham Vanmeter, William Bur-
gan, Alexander Hanna.
George Blair and Thomas Armstrong were the first justices of the peace.
Fred Garver erected the first saw-mill in the township, in 1814. A
year later he built the first grist-mill, deriving his water power from the
Little Apple creek.
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Being so near the city of Wooster, there have never grown up any towns
of much importance in Wayne township. The only one now in existence is
Madisonburg, in the center of the township.
The churches and schools of this township are treated in the two chap-
ters on these respective subjects, and to which the reader is referred.
While it is not the object of this volume to treat much on the personal
histories of many of the pioneers, as many are fully treated in the biograph-
ical volume of this work, yet it may be of historic interest to mention, in this
township history, something concerning the life and deeds of the Wasson
family.
Joseph Wasson, Sr., was born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, March
29. T775- His grandson, Joseph Wasson, was born June 30, 1839, two miles
east of Congress village, Wayne county, Ohio, and until the age of eighteen
years, remained upon the farm, when he first began his ventures upon the
untried seas of life's journeys. He spent much of his life on the Pacific
coast, where he achieved a reputation as a writer. He was for many years
a newspaper man, acting as editor, proprietor and correspondent. He at-
tended the Vienna Exposition as a special correspondent for Forney's Press ,
writing a series of brilliant letters, signed “Josef-” On his return, he was
despatched to New Orleans by the Press and New York Times as a corre-
spondent. He was one of the early contributors to the Overland Monthly .
He was in the campaign and within twelve miles of General Custer when he
was destroyed by the Indians, a correspondent of Eastern papers and furnish-
ing the news of that region to the Associated Press. He finally settled down
in such work and profession in San Francisco, California.
GREENE TOWNSHIP.
Greene township is second from the north as well as from the east line
of Wayne county — in it the thriving city of Orrville is situated — and it was
organized February 5, 1817. taking its name from Major-Gen. Nathaniel
Greene, a Revolutionary soldier and a native of Warwick, Rhode Island. The
population has grown from two thousand seven hundred and fifteen in 1870
to three thousand three hundred and eighteen in 1900, as shown by the fed-
eral census. The first township officers were: Trustees, Peter Flickinger.
George Bodyston. Thomas Hayes; treasurer. Thomas Dawson: clerk, David
Boydston.
Of the first settlers and the first events in this township let it be recorded
f-M)
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in this connection that the inhabitants of this part of Wayne county observed
one peculiarity in the first occupancy of it. It was a wilderness, overgrown
with timber, with the exception of about twelve acres on the southwest quarter
of section 3, which was clear of trees, stumps, and even roots, and was called
by the first comers “the Indian field.”
Tradition is not always reliable to pin history to, but in the absence of
the recorded facts we always must place some credence to traditionary fea-
tures of early settlements. In this case a tradition runs thus: As early as
1802, a party of four young men, who had passed from Pennsylvania to
Cleveland, and leaving the latter place for Tuscarawa, nowr Coshocton, were
attacked by the Indians and one of their number killed, when the remaining
three retrated by the line of trees they had blazed. The bullet that killed
the young man entered a small oak tree, wfhich the Indians notched high
above the ground. A few years later two of the three young men, accompa-
nied by others, returned to the spot of the murder, discovered the notched
tree, but saw no remains of their dead comrade. This was evidently the first
white person to meet death within w hat is now Greene township.
The first settlement was made in 1811 by Michael Thomas with his wife
and seven children. He emigrated from Washington county, Pennsylvania,
and located on the southwest quarter of section 33. Following him came in
Thomas Boydston and wrife, who settled on the same section. For three
years these were the only settlers in the towmship. In 1814 Lorenzo Winkler
and family came in from Virginia, settling on section 22. Until 1815 emi-
gration to this part of the county was very limited. Among those who soon
found their way to this township, and became permanent settlers may be
mentioned George Boydston, Thomas Hayes, David McConahay, David
Boydston, David Antles, Thomas Dawson. John Wade, George Smith,
Thomas Smith, Jacob Breakfield, John Harris, Douglas Wilford, Barter Har-
ris, James Sparks, John Hobbs, Francis Shackler, Isaac Robins, Phineas
Burrwell, Thomas Johnston, John Bigham, Robert Calvins, Jacob Cook,
Charles Kelley, Will Ruffcorn, George Carson, Jacob Breakbail and Thomas
Alison.
By 1817 the township had a population of one hundred and forty-seven
souls, of which twenty-six were legal voters. In April, 1817, the first elec-
tion was held at the residence of William Barnett, on section 21.
The first birth in the township was a daughter of Michael Thomas, bom
September 25, 1812; the second was that of Richard Antles, February 3,
1813.
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The first marriage in the township was that of Liverton Thomas and
Anna Wade, by “Priest” Jones, in 1815.
The first saw-mill erected was by Thomas Smith, on a site where Smith-
ville now stands.
The first frame building was constructed in 1822, on the farm later
owned by Cyrus Hoover.
In the autumn of 1815 John Wade built a hand-mill to crush corn for
family use; this was situated upon the farm later owned by D. L. Kieffer.
As late as 1819 there were visible indications of the old Indian village
situated on section 21.
The first warrant was issued for the arrest of John Treasurer, for as-
sault and battery, upon complaint of Cephas Clark. Treasurer was a “fortune
teller,” and Clark had his fortune told “on tick” ; the teller proved to be a
liar, and Clark “bucked” and wouldn’t pay, whereupon Treasurer got him
“in chancery” and drafted “sirloins on his frontispiece.” Both were citizens
of East Union township.
The first sermon preached in Greene township was undoubtedly in 1812,
by Reverend Gray at the house of Mr. Thomas.
The first school was taught by Peter Kane, a student of Oxford, Eng-
land. The pioneer school house was a log cabin eighteen by twenty-two feet,
on the northwest quarter of section 23.
The first death in the township after its settlement by the white race was
on December 27, 1817, and occurred at a raising on the old Ruble farm, the
victim being Christian Partshie, who was killed by the falling of a stick of
timber.
This township has been the site of several towns and villages, including
Smithville, Orrville and Weilerville.
The schools and churches of this township will be treated under their
respective headings in another chapter.
The present business interests of Smithville is represented as follows:
Postoffice, S. B. Norris, postmaster, W. H. Hutchison, assistant; hardware,
Hartzler & Gerig and E. S. Brenneman ; grocery, John Swanger and Hous-
ton ; grocery and drygoods, J. J. Schrock ; exclusive grocery, Blough & Com-
pany; shoe store, Isaac Deahuff ; grocery and produce, Kohler & Hilty ; drugs,
T. A. C. Pontius. The trades are as follows: Blacksmith, Clyde Mertz,
Charles Everett, Nicholas Curie; grist-mill, John B. McCollough; warehouses,
H. S. Rutt, handling all kinds of produce and coal ; lumbermen, E. E. Gilber,
C. G. Miller (with a planing mill) ; butchers, A. E. Bechtol, J. B. Sheller,
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wholesale and retail; hotel, W. G. Coulter; bank, Farmers and Merchants.
The professional men were, at the same date, Drs. W. G. Zimmerman, H.
M. Yoder, H. A. Schollenberger ; attorney, Joseph Gallagher.
The banking business is carried on at this point by the Farmers and
Merchants Bank, with W. H. Zaugg as its president and E. U. Burkholder
as its cashier.
BAUGHMAN TOWNSHIP.
This is on the east line of Wayne county and the second from the north
line of the county. It derived its name from John Baughman, who was the
grandfather of John W. Baughman, of Wooster, who was the first settler
within the township, which civil sub-division of the county was organized
March 5, 1816. In 1870 it had a population of two thousand and sixty-seven,
but according to the federal census of 1900 it contained a population of two
thousand four hundred and ninety-seven.
Among the earliest settlers in this township may be named the Fore-
man family, the Harkins family, Robert Taggart, Samuel Taggart, Lewis
McKean, Sr., John Campbell, Valentine W. Ault, John Sickman, John Wil-
son, Benjamin Weygandt, John Douglas and others, whose sons and daugh-
ters reside in the county at this time.
This is a rich and well-developed agricultural district and the towns of
the township are Marshallville and Burton, while a part of the town plat of
Orrville is within the borders of this township.
MARSHALLVILLE.
This town is located in the extreme northwestern portion of Baugh-
man township, on section 5. It was laid out by James Marshall, February 7,
1817, the same being the next village platted after that of Wooster was laid
out. Mr. Marshall was an excellent man, a sturdy member of the old
Seceder church of Dalton. Marshallville was named by and for Mr. Marshall
and in 1834, when Martin Weimer came to the place, there were but ten
houses, and there were occupied by Elijah Dancer, Calvin Brewster, James
and Joseph Hogan. Enoch Mofitt, James Marshall, John Roch and Dr.
Comstock and two shoemakers named Ellingham and Scotton.
The town was legally incorporated as a municipality February 10, 1866.
Its first officers were Charles Schlutt, mayor; C. L. Gehres, recorder; Martin
Weimer. George Reinoehl, Benjamin Carrel, John Pfunder, William Pinkley.
councilmen. The population of Marshallville in 1900 was three hundred and
fifty-seven.
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The banking business here is carried on by the Marshallville Banking
Company, with I. W. Beery as its cashier.
FAIRVIEW, OR BURTON CITY.
The village of Fairview was surveyed by John Brinkerhoff, December
14, 1850. A post office was, however, established there, known as Burton
City, first being called Baughman.
Flouring mills were erected here in 1858 by Benjamin Coe, the same
having a capacity of forty barrels a day. Besides supplying a large home
trade, the product of these mills was shipped to Philadelphia.
The Burton City Woolen Mills were established in i860 by Isaac Van-
guilder. There were produced cloths, cassimeres, blankets, jeans, satinets,
stocking yarns and a large variety of flannels.
On June 9, 1874, the steam grist-mill of C. G. Binkley was blown up,
suddenly killing George W. Henshaw, of Wooster, and causing the death
of Mr. Binkley within a few hours.
SUGARCREEK TOWNSHIP.
On the east line of Wayne county and the second from the south line
is found the civil township of Sugarcreek. It was organized April 11,
1812, and contains thirty-six sections of land, being six miles square. Its
population increased from two thousand six in 1870 to two thousand two
hundred and seventy-four in 1900.
John Kinney and John Goudy were the first settlers in Sugar Creek
township, and John and James Goudy were the next, and after them came
Peter Cox and Samuel Cook, William Homan, and Rev. James Adams, who
was the first preacher in the locality. William Homan was the first justice
of the peace, elected about 1826. At an early day an election was held
where Sugarcreek, East Union, Baughman and Greene corner, and every
man who attended it went home with two offices. The first school house
in the township was built on the farm owned later by Jacob Cox, and Sam-
uel Cook was the first to teach in the township. It was a subscription school
and the rates were fifty cents a pupil for each month’s schooling, and in
the absence of money almost anything else was received for pay. The
first school house erected in Dalton was where later the cemetery was laid
out; the first teacher was Peter Vorrhes. The first church (Presbyterian)
was built near the southwest corner of the quarter later owned by S.
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Snavely; Rev. James Adams being the first minister. This was the earliest
church building in the township or town.
William Goudy built the first grist-mill, three miles southwest of Dal-
ton. It was constructed of logs, had one run of buhrs made of “nigger-
heads,” the neighbors helping to dig the race. This mill was built in
1823-24.
James Goudy came to what is now Sugarcreek township as early as
1809, settling near Dalton. His brother John had effected a settlement in
the neighborhood even prior to his settlement. The father. John Goudy,
was in St. Clair’s defeat, November 4, 1791, where he was wounded in the
right groin, which, but for the thickness of his clothing, would have caused
death. After being shot he traveled eighteen miles, when he paused by
the wayside and ate the flesh of a dead horse, which later he declared was
the best meat he had ever eaten. He carried the bullet in his flesh many
years and finally died from its effects.
TOWNS AND VILLAGES.
Of the town of Dalton it may be recorded that Rev. James Adams had
the town of Dover surveyed October 16, 1817, by A. Porter, and it em-
braced forty-six lots. Sharon was surveyed March 29, 1828, by C. W.
Christmas, and that consisted of thirty lots. The entirety of these towns,
together with that of Middletown, laid out by Jacob Switzer, in 1828, ceas-
ing to exist as plats, the village of Dalton sprung up on the same ground.
In 1821 Dalton contained but one house, and a man named Freeman kept the
first tavern, where afterwards the Eagle House stood. The first physician
of the place was Doctor Watson, and the first store was kept by Mr. John-
son. The first church of the village was the Presbyterian.
Dalton of today consists of a place having a population of six hundred
and sixty-six, and has several good business houses, carrying the goods
usually kept in towns of its size, and the farmers find here an accommodat-
ing class of dealers and ready sale for the products of their farms and
gardens. For church and other interests see special chapters elsewhere in
this volume.
Die banking business of this place is well cared for by the First Na-
tional Bank, with a capital of twentv-five thousand dollars. Its present
officers are W. H. H. Wertz, president; T. C. Hunsicker, cashier. Their
deposits are (September, 1909) $162,000.
Moscow was laid out by Joseph H. Larwill, Josiah Crawford and John
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Larwill, April 16, 1815, but it never materialized to the extent o f its san-
guine proprietors’ hopes.
“Sonneberg Settlement’" was so named for a settlement in Switzerland,
its population being chiefly from the canton Berne, in Switzerland. The
following was Written of this peculiar people in 1878.
“They enumerate ninety-eight families and have two hundred and fifty-
eight members. The sect was founded by Menno, surnamed Simmons, in
1536, who commenced life as a Roman Catholic. The modem Mennonite as
a rule does not pretend to know just what the history of his sect is, or just
what he now believes. They know they are opposed to war and going to
law. . They follow farm life as a rule, and are very industrious. In this
township they introduced the painting of dog-houses and the manufacture
of apple-jack. The first of this stock, all from Berne, to come into Wayne
county were Isaac Somer, Uhlrick and Peter Lehman and David Killhover,
the latter bringing the regular John Rogers family. Their first place of
rendezvous was in a school house four miles east of Wooster, when they
moved to ‘Switzerland No. 2,’ and in 1820 organized a church.”
EAST UNION TOWNSHIP.
This township was formed September 5, 1814, and was named by Simon
Chaffin, Sr., who was a native of Union, Maine. It is the second township
from the east and south line of the county and is six miles square.
The following is a reminiscence on the early times by Simon Chaffin,
Jr. : “The first white man who died in East Union township was Vesta
Frary, who was buried on the John Ramsey farm with thirty or forty others.
Mr. Chaffin cut musket balls out of trees, shot there by members of Beall’s
army. On Amos Walter’s farm was erected one of the first churches, called
the Ebenezer church. The Methodists soon after organized in the town-
ship. The presiding elder was Rev. Henry O. Sheldon, who was a strong
man and could carry a barrel of salt or cider with ease. Two drunken men
on one occasion disturbed a camp meeting when he was present, and he
choked them into silence. The Indians had a sugar camp on land later
owned by John Lang, also there were two huts there. The first school
house was upon land then owned by Anson Sillson. built in 1814. The
teacher was a Mr. Pratt and he spelled door ‘dore.’ The first justice of the
peace was Andrew Lucky, who kept a tavern.”
The first permanent settler in this township was Simon Chaffin, Sr., a
native of Lincoln county, Maine, who was born in 1765 and removed to
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Ohio in the fall of 1811, coming in a four-horse wagon, traveling a distance
of more than a thousand miles, occupying fifty-seven days, never unloading
the wagon until he arrived at Poland, Trumbull county, Ohio. He moved
to East Union township, Wayne county, in the early spring of 1813. His
wife and six children accompanied him; his brother-in-law, Obediah Luce,
came at the same time. He entered lands, but his regular occupation was
that of a scythemaker and hoemaker.
Frederick Brown, a native of Pennsylvania, moved to Wayne county,
Ohio, in the spring of 1814, but had been in the county with his son, John
J., in 1812 and improved a piece of land on a twelve-hundred-acre tract he
had secured from the government. He was the first of the name Brown to
locate in Wayne county. The subjoined reminiscence will tell the story of
early-day Indian scares and narrate many other interesting points connected
with the settlement of this township and Wayne county, in general :
“This will narrate an incident that occurred in what was called Smith's
settlement, near the present site of the county infirmary. One afternoon
two of the Smith women heard what they supposed to be guns firing in
the direction of Wooster, ‘at the rate of five hundred a minute.’ The neigh-
borhood, numbering about forty persons, soon assembled, men, women and
children. There were but eight guns in the party. One of these belonged
to John J. Brown, then a boy and small for his age. After consultation
it was decided that James Mclntire should approach Wooster cautiously to
ascertain the exact state of affairs there, and that the balance of the company
should set out for Steubenville, by way of the old Indian trail, the women and
children on horseback and the men on foot with their guns. Young Brown's
gun was transferred to an older man. and two children committed to his
care. Waits Smith, a small boy whom he carried behind him, on a very
spirited horse, and Jonathan, a younger boy, who was placed in his arms.
“The party traveled in silence during the entire night, not a child giving
the least sign of fretfulness. In the morning they were overtaken by Mc-
lntire, who brought the welcome news that Wooster was resting in quietude
and that the noise heard by the two women was one made by men cutting
straw with axes in a trough for feed. At this news the main company of
fugitives returned, hungry and weary, to their cabin homes in the forest. A
few. however, continued on in their flight to the old settlements in Penn-
sylvania.
“Nevertheless, this stampede of the pioneers was not without thrilling
incident. When the party in its flight was crossing the Big Sugar creek
they discovered a campfire close to the trail. The Indian dogs barked and
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immediately the Indians raised a whoop. At this the company took shelter
in the brushwood as best they could. All became quiet in a short time, when
those with guns began to scout around to learn the character of the Indians
in the camp. They proved to be Chief Johnycake and his tribe. The story
the whites told alarmed them and they said they would also flee the country,
as they were friendly Indians and equally in danger of being hurt by the
hostile tribes, but that they must first have their supper, then roasting on the
campfire. Afterwards Mclntire passed their encampment. He was blowing
a large tin horn and riding at full gallop to overtake the flying settlers and
apprise them of their groundless apprehension. Johnycake and his braves
became greatly alarmed and fled supperless, as on the returning day the
settlers who wended their way home found the camp entirely deserted. The
deer was suspended over the smouldering embers, burned to a crisp. Johny-
cake and his people were never seen again in that settlement by the whites.
They had before that time been very familiar and friendly.”
The following interesting notes were written on the recollections of
pioneer Noah Brown:
The first election was held in section 16, at Smith Orr’s house. Andrew
Lucky was elected first justice of the peace. The first school house wras
built on section 21, although a log house built before that for the Presby-
terian church to hold services in was used for school purposes. The earliest
teachers were George Hackett and George McConnell. The first burial was
on the John Ramsey farm, and tw'O w-ere buried on the Smith Orr place,
a Mr. Miller and a child that was scalded to death. Old Aaron Rambo had
the first grist-mill in this township, near the residence of David Carr, and
the bolt was turned by hand. After Rambo, Garret Albertson erected an-
other mill. South of Cross Keys at a spring a Mr. Pratt had the first
distillery. At the head of Apple creek there was an Indian camp. Mr.
Brown had a grindstone which was bought at Canton, Ohio, as the family
came to the country, and it is said that it wras used by many neighbors from
long distances away.
Herr Driesbach, the famous lion tamer, lived and died in Wayne county.
He was born in Sharon, Schoharie county. Newr York, November 2, 1807,
his grandparents coming from Germany. His father died wrhen eleven
years of age and the boy soon drifted to New York city, where he worked in
the Zoological Gardens, and soon, youth as he was, made a reputation for
control of wild animals, he being the first person to make a performing ani-
mal of the leopard. In 1830 he connected himself with the traveling menag-
erie of Raymond & Co., and soon went to Europe with Raymond, meeting
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with much success as a tamer of wild beasts. He traveled through England,
Scotland and Ireland, then in France, Germany, Holland and Russia, exhib-
iting before all the crowned heads of Europe. About 1840 he returned
to the United States, having established a world-wide reputation, and was
of the states of the Un’on until 1854, when he was united in marriage to
the foremost man in his profession in the world. He made his annual tours
Sarah Walter, daughter of John Walter, of Wooster township, and settled
down to the peaceful life of a farmer. In 1875 he opened a hotel at Apple-
creek Station. Here, after but two days’ illness, on December 5, 1877,
he died, leaving a widow and one son. His was a very interesting life, full
of events which after his death were compiled in book form and sold ex-
tensively.
The Cheyney family was one of striking prominence in Wayne couijty,
and descended from the Revolutionary stock of the same name, of which
Thomas, the father of John, who settled in Wayne county, was famous by
reason of his first discovering, for General Washington, that the British
forces were on the same side of the stream as the American army at Chad’s
Ford, near Brandywine, Chester county, Pennsylvania, and through this
intelligence the American army was saved a defeat, as is recorded in the
history of our country.
Old Squire Cheyney was a most useful and powerful man in the settle-
ment of Wayne county. He built the first mill in East Union township, and
within the space of thirteen years built six grist-mills and nine sawmills in
Wayne county, Ohio. His early neighbors were John Knight, Jacob Tracey,
George Basil and others. He occasionally received visits from old Johnny
Appleseed, whom Richard Cheyney frequently saw. His remains were buried
in the Edinburg cemetery.
TOWNS OF EAST UNION TOWNSHIP.
Edinburg was laid out by William Thomas and John L. Cheyney, Au-
gust 16, 1832. Ira Pratt started the first store and was the postmaster in
Edinburg. Prior to the appointment of Cornelius Smith the postoffice was
kept at the old town, and after that at Applecreek Station.
Applecreek Station, which is of more recent origin, was caused by the
building of the Cleveland, Mt. Vernon & Columbus railway. Andrew Wood-
ruff, a blacksmith, erected the first house in Applecreek Station. John Hind-
man owned the land on which this village was platted. David Clark, later
of Wooster, started the first hotel. A ne\v school building was built in 1874.
Messrs. Eberly. Holcomb and Caldwell were the first three teachers.
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In 1909 the village of East Union was but a mere hamlet with one
firm — Carver & Eshleman — handling drygoods, groceries, notions, hardware,
boots and shoes, cigars and tobacco. They also operate a grain elevator and
warehouse.
WOOSTER TOWNSHIP.
This sub-division of Wayne county was named in honor of Gen. David
Wooster, and was organized April 11, 1812, along with Sugarcreek, Mohican
and Prairie townships. It had a population of one thousand one hundred
and forty-five in 1870 and by 190a had increased to seven thousand one hun-
dred and sixty. This is the township in which the city of Wooster is situated,
and as now divided contains only twenty-one sections. Franklin township
is on its south while Plain is to its west, with Wayne township north and
East Union on the east. Being situated as it is (surrounding the city of
Wooster), its history is largely found in the city history given elsewhere in
this volume. Benjamin Jones was one of the first settlers, and the follow-
ing are some of his recollections concerning early times here :
In 1814 Mr. Jones went on horseback to Coshocton, accompanied by
William Totten, to buy flour, bacon, salt, dried fruits, ets., for the early
settlement, which commodities he placed on a pirogue and with the help of
a few stout men paddled the rude boat to the waters of the Killbuck and up
through the drift of that sluggish stream to the mouth of Applecreek, and
thence up that creek to where the old Robison's Mill stood, within the
incorporation of Wooster. This exploit of inland navigation was heralded
with acclamation by the inhabitants of Wooster, who rushed to the boat
to obtain their supplies. He built the first bridge that was ever laid across
the Muddy Fork, and constructed the road extending from Reedsburg across
the quagmire to what was known as the “French Miller’' property. He had
sixteen men employed on the contract, and at night one-half of the number
guarded the others while they slept. During this work one of his laborers
was killed and literally mangled by the Indians. There were at this time
but three houses between Wooster and Jeromeville. Several weeks were
employed on this contract, Mr. Jones doing the cooking for his men in the
woods and performing his duties with true early-day skill.
Mr. Jones constructed the first bridge on the Killbuck, on what was
known as the Columbus Avenue road. He aided in securing the charter for
the turnpike running from Wooster to Cleveland, and was a director and
stockholder in the same. He exerted himself both in and outside the State
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Legislature in behalf of the choice of the Killbuck route for the Ohio canal.
In 1816-17 he built the first jail in Wayne county, constructing it cheaply
from the old logs of the block house erected by George Stidger in 1812.
On July 4, 1824, Mr. Jones and wife, then keeping the Wooster Hotel,
roasted an ox and prepared a grand dinner for the occasion. The tickets
to this banquet sold at fifty cents and there were over three hundred sold.
The ox was roasted among the elders and brush in the rear of Lindell
Sprague’s residence. Many distinguished men were present, including Con-
gressman John Sloan, Brigadier-General Beall, Judge Ezra Dean and others.
After the dinner was over, Mr. Jones invited the children of the town to a
free entertainment.-
On one occasion Mr. Jones went to Morgan s, down the Killbuck, to get
provisions, and among other things Mrs. Morgan gave him some fresh
meat which she put in a large gourd of the capacity of a half bushel. The
wolves, scenting the meat, pursued him with fierceness and angry demon-
strations, when several times he thought he would have to throw everything
away and try to save himself.
While traveling on horseback up the Killbuck bottoms, south of Woos-
ter, Mr. Jones captured three black bear cubs and put them in a sack over
the saddle. They proved, however, to be heavier than he had calculated,
and, hearing the mother of the cubs approaching, he considered it wise to
throw one out of the sack, and gave the others away. He carried the
mail from Canton to Mansfield on horseback. He aided in the organization
of the first agricultural society, and he owned a colt that took the premium
at the first county fair.
After an eventful career, both in public and private life, Mr. Jones died,
honored by all who knew him. It was such characters as his that fashioned
the foundation stones of the good government of his state and county.
PLAIN TOWNSHIP.
Flain township, the second from the south line of the county and on the
western line of Wayne county, contains about forty-two sections of land,
being seven miles east and west by six north and south. It was organized in
1817. It derives its name from the plains, or grades, that to so large an
extent constituted its timber growths at the date of its settlement. The
population of this township in 1900 was one thousand six hundred and
sixty-six.
The first settler in the township was John Collier, locating on the
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James Childs farm. William Meeks, a native of Virginia, was the second
settler in this township. The first justice of the peace in the township was
Cyrus Baird. George and David Lozier settled upon the prairies in 1814,
south of Blachleyville. They came from Pennsylvania and owned good
farms. Benjamin White, a shoemaker and preacher, was another of the
sturdy pioneer characters. Daniel Miller built a sawmill in 1815. lie also
built the first house in Blachleyville, where Swain’s hotel later stood. He
kept a tavern and sold whisky; went to Indiana and began the practice of
medicine. Augustus Case settled as early as 1814. John Cassiday was the
first to teach school within this township. The first minister of the gospel
was Elder French, a Baptist. Another early settler was Philip Arnold, of
Lehigh county, Pennsylvania, who came in 1812; for many months after
their arrival they had no bread in the house and were compelled to live on
venison, honey and potatoes.
Dr. William B. Blachley, born in New Jersey, lived in Washington
county, Pennsylvania, until 1816, when he emigrated to Wayne county, Ohio,
settling in Plain township. He practiced his profession in Blachleyville for
nineteen years, then moved to Valparaiso, Indiana, where he died, aged
seventy-four years. The town of Blachleyville was named for him.
Benedict Mellinger, Sr., Aaron Baird, Cyrus Baird, John Tyron, Robert
Eason, John Folgate (who reached the age of one hundred and eleven years,
the oldest of any man in the county), William and Henry Rouch were all
settlers of a very early date in Plain township, and had much to do with
laying the foundation stones of the township’s government and helped to
make its first pioneer improvements.
TOWNS AND VILLAGES OF PLAIN TOWNSHIP.
The town plattings of this township are indeed quite numerous. Mill-
brook received its title from General Thomas McMillan, who named and
surveyed it. It was laid out by Elijah Yocum August 10, 1829. A grist-
mill was built by McMillan to the east of the town site in 1816 for John
Nimmon; later this was turned into a carding-mill.
Blachleyville was platted by William B. and William Blachley, Decem-
ber 16, 1833.
Jefferson was platted June 30, 1829, by Stephen Williams and Alex-
ander Hutchinson. This place is four miles west of Wooster and came to
be a place of much business importance. It was on the Wooster and Ash-
land stage route, making it a desirable quarter in which to live.
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Reedsburg was laid out by William Reed in December, 1835, and its
first settlers were Matthias Starn, Joseph Mowery, John Peters and Wil-
liam Hagerman.
Springville \vas platted by David Brown, December 16, 1844, and was
originally called Buffalo, or Heath’s Corners.
REMAINS OF BUFFALOES AND CEDAR TREES.
Land owners in plowing and ditching on the way between Springville
and Millbrook, many years ago, unearthed the remains of large cedar trees,
and about 1830 immense logs were taken out three feet from the surface that
had probably lain there for ages. Trees were found from three to four feet
in diameter. South of Millbrook, while cutting a ditch, more of these large
cedar trees were found. What is strange about all this is the fact that there
are no cedar forests in this section, nor is there any knowledge of any having
been here in the centuries past. In about the same locality were also found
numerous buffalo skulls and horns and the remains of human bodies of great
size. Who they were and what their history can only be conjectured at this
late day.
CLINTON TOWNSHIP.
Clinton township is the extreme southwestern township in Wayne county
and contains twenty-eight sections, its domain being four miles north and
south by seven east and west.- Ashland county is on its west and Holmes
county to its south. It was organized June 7, 1825, and in 1870 had reached
a population of one thousand five hundred and two, but according to the
United States census of 1900 the township had a population of two thousand
and twenty-eight. It derived its name from Governor DeWitt Clinton.
The first white men to invade the wilds of this township for the pur-
pose of effecting a permanent settlement were as follows : Nathan G. Odell,
John Newkirk, Joshua and Thomas Oram, Thomas Odell, Abner Lake, Jacob
Funk. Aimer Eddy. Thomas McConkev. John Jones, Stephen Morgan, Asa
Griffith. William and J. Wells, Reuben and Philip Avlesworth. Noah Whit-
ford, Lorenzo D. Odell.
Mr. Brewer built a cabin on the east bank of the Newkirk spring, about
twenty feet from its source.
The first election in the township was held in the cabin of John Jones.
Nathan G. Odell was chosen first justice of the peace, but he declined to serve.
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when James Priest was elected and served the remainder of his life. The first
public road opened was the one running from Wooster to Loudonville. An
Indian trail extended from the head of Odell’s lake to Millersburg, and one
to Jeromeville from the same point. The Indian town was located on the
north side of the lake and contained about three hundred Indians, under Mo-
hican John.
What was known as the Big Prairie was at first looked upon as an
impassable swamp; it was soggy, wet, full of ponds, dangerous to stock and
counted of no value.
The first man known to have died within Clinton township was Thomp-
son, an emigrant who took sick while stopping with John Newkirk. He was
sick but a short time.
The first physician in the township was Dr. Henry Peters, who located at
the intersection of the roads at the Newkirk graveyard. The first woman to
die in the township was the wife of Thomas Oram.
In 1814 Reuben Newkirk and Thomas Odell, two young men, went to
Wooster to procure a coffin, carrying it home on the backs of their horses.
Each bore one end of it, though at times the end would strike the trees, when
they would singly, time about, have to carry it on their shoulders.
The first resident of the township to marry was Thomas, son of Nathan
G. Odell, who was united to Nancy Drake, of Holmes county, in 1813.
The first school house in this township was called the Newkirk school.
It was located on Henry Newkirk’s land. It was a small log affair, the
neighbors having met, cut trees and converted them into a school house. It
was covered with shingles, and contained three long benches for the children,
and a fireplace running the whole length of it. The first teacher was a lady
from Holmes county who received seventy-five cents per week for teaching.
The first church was erected by the Disciples, about a mile and a half
northeast of Shreve.
The first work of Methodism in the township was near Newkirk Spring,
where a church was built in 1843. See chapter on church history.
At an early day, in this township were the following named persons
engaged in the distillery business: Almond Aylesworth, Henry Shreve,
Thomas McConkey, Thomas A. Brown, Mahaley McConkey and John Comer.
Cornelius Quick built the first mill at the outlet of the lake, in 1825 ; his
dam backwatered the region and raised the lake about fifteen inches. Nathan
G. Odell sold the land, not wishing to litigate over the matter. Comer, how-
ever, later had a law suit over it and, after long years of lawing, both men
were financially ruined.
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The towns and villages of this township are Shreve, Craghton, Big
Prairie and Centerville.
FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP.
Franklin is one of the two irregular-shaped townships in Wayne county,
the other being Wooster township. Franklin was named from old Benjamin
Franklin of Philadelphia, the statesman and scientist. The township was
organized for civil purposes June 7, 1820. Its population is now about one
thousand two hundred and one.
The first settlement made by any one in Wayne county, outside of Woos-
ter, was made in this township on lands later owned by Thomas Dowty. James
Morgan and Thomas Butler were the two white settlers who first wandered
into the territory now embraced in this township. They came in 1808 and
soon after came in John Boyd, Robert Buckley, John and James Cisna,
Tommy Lock, Samuel Mitchell, Jacob Nixon, William Nolan, Jacob Miller,
Moses Lockhart and John Hughes.
The first land entered in the township, in the regular way, was by
James Morgan.
The first justice of the peace was Samuel Mitchell. One of the early
school houses was the Polecat school house on the farm of Daniel Daringer.
The pioneer distillery of the township was conducted by old Johnny
Boyd, who sold it in quantities, “Yes, sir, just as little as you want, sir/’
The first grist mill was erected by a Mr. Mitchell on land later owned
by Andrew Bucher.
The first lime in Wayne county was burned in a log heap to test
its quality, and later a kiln was made and lime successfully burned in the
same by Henry Munson. Sr., in 1816 or 1817. It was he who furnished the
lime employed in the building of the old Wiler house of Mansfield, hauling
it there by ox teams at about fifty cents a bushel. At nights he slept under
his wagon, while he turned his oxen out to graze.
Among the recollections of Pioneer John Harrison, the following was,
many years since, made a matter of record : “Salt was worth six cents a
pound when I came here. Bought a two-horse wagon from old Billy Poulson
in 1826 and paid for it in salt; went to Cleveland for it; obtained one barrel
there and one barrel ten miles out of the city. These two barrels of salt paid
for the wagon — price thirty dollars. A bushel of wheat would then pay for
a pound of coffee, the former being of little cash account until the canal
was opened. There were some Indians about when we came here. Old
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Chief Dan Lyon remained after the other Indians had all left. He was used
to making wooden ladles and trade them to the whites for bacon.”
INDIANS BURN THE BUTLER CABIN.
From a reminiscence dictated by John Butler, a pioneer justice of the
peace of Franklin township, we take the liberty to extract the following.
Mr. Butler being absent at his father-in-law’s, the Indians burned his
cabin. The cause was presumed to be as follows: Butler had raised con-
siderable com in the bottoms and had a good many hogs. A gang of In-
dians passed one day and shot one of them. Mr. Butler followed after and
found them encamped in the locality of the present site of Shreve. He went
to the chief and told him the circumstances, and that he must pay him, the
chief going to the thief and telling him he must pay for the hog he killed.
He asked him what he killed it for, whereupon the Indian replied, “I wanted
grease/’ The chief made him pay for the animal, Mr. Butler receiving in
pay therefor two deer skins, which the Indian indignantly kicked toward
him. It was soon after this Mr. Butler's cabin was burned, and he claimed
the gang of Indians did it. He then erected a hewed log house on the exact
spot where had stood the rude cabin that they had burned. In this Mr.
Butler died March 17, 1837.
THE MORGAN BLOCKHOUSE.
This fort stood on the Thomas Dowty farm, and but a few rods from
his house, and was quite a large structure and a source of protection to
the pioneers. During the summer of Hull’s surrender a company of soldiers
were stationed here from Tuscarawas county. A would-be brave soldier of
this company was ever boasting of his courage and ached for an oppor-
tunity to have a fight with the Indians. The boys concluded they would ac-
commodate him. They caused to be painted and decked in true Indian style
of costume one of their number, and had him secrete himself in a swamp close
by. The company proceeded on one of its scouts and passed by this swam]),
when the mythical Indian sprang out, yelling and pointing his gun, took
after Sir Valiant Soldier, who rushed at the top of his speed and concealed
himself in a marsh. The company and the painted man rapidly returned
to the blockhouse. Soon thereafter the would-be Indian fighter, who had
lost his shoes in the swamp, returned. Some of the boys went in search of
his shoes and brought them into camp.
(25)
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DEATH OF OLD CHIEF LYON.
Alexander Bell, of Holmesville, once informed 'Squire Butler that when
he was a boy he went to old Lyon’s camp, near the mouth of Butler Spring
run, and found him in a sick condition in his rude hut. Lyon asked Bell
to take his camp kettle and bring him some fresh water, Which he did,
when Lyon asked him to look at his tongue. Bell told him how it looked,
when the old chief said, “Me dead Indian/’ Bell said, “I will go and tell
Jess Morgan if you wish me to,” to which Lyon consented. Jess came,
accompanied by Bell, and they found the old chief very sick, whereupon he
repaired to Sandusky and communicated the facts to his Indian friends, when
several of them came along back with Jess. They took the old Indian upon
one of their ponies, but in a few days word came back that his spirit had
gone to the happy hunting ground.
Throughout the county there used to be many reports concerning this
old chief. The early settlers all knew him, as he visited their cabins and
frequently was a source of terror to women and children.
/ MORELAND VILLAGE.
Moreland is the only village ever platted within Franklin township.
It was laid out by Jonathan Butler and George Morr January 17, 1829. The
first building in the place was erected by a blacksmith for a shop; his name
was Loux.
SALT CREEK TOWNSHIP.
Salt Creek township is on the south line of Wayne county and the
second township from the eastern line of the county, with Holmes county
on the south, Paint township on the east, Franklin on the west and East
Union township on the north. It contains twenty-four sections, is four
miles from north to south and six from east to west. It was formed March
5, 1816.
Of the first settler in this township and his family, the following may
be narrated: William Searight was born October 17, 1779, in Cumberland
county, Pennsylvania. His father was a native of Ireland, who came to
America about 1760, settling at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He served seven
years in the Revolutionary war. William, the son, who came to Wayne
county, Ohio, selected lands here in 1810 and built a small log cabin on
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the banks of Salt Creek, facing the Pine Hill.,, He was then the only man
and his family the only family within Salt Creek township, as no^ bounded
— indeed he was “monarch of all he surveyed.” Ke entered four hundred
and sixty acres. His nearest neighbors lived in Prairie township, Holmes
county. The next to effect a settlement in Salt Creek township was Henry
Barnes, just after the close of the war of 1812-14. After the news of Hull's
surrender, Mr. Searight and family fled for safety to the blockhouse, four
and a half miles distant, built in Prairie township. Holmes county. The
Indians there were friendly. About this time old Chief Lyon visited Sea-
rights and told Mrs. Searight that he had cut the tongues from out of ninety-
nine women and wanted hers to make an even hundred. Mr. Searight died
July 16, 1846, and his good wife followed him in February, 1848. They had
ten children.
From the memory of Pioneer Joseph Miller the following facts concern-
ing this township are given to enrich its history:
William Searight built the first saw mill erected on Salt creek, the
date being 1813. Judge Frederick built the next mill in 1816. The Sea-
right mill burned and John Cheyney and Samuel Miller rebuilt another in
1820 for saw mill purposes only. Frederick's second mill was built in 1836,
and had a capacity of two hundred barrels a day — a very large flou ring-mill
for then or even later years in the history of milling. This mill was
burned in 1876. James Russell, a blacksmith, built the first house in the
town. Samuel Miller built and conducted the first hotel. Jacob Frederick
had the first distillery in the township and it is related that in the days when
the old Ohio canal was being constructed that there were no less than eight
distilleries within two miles of Fredericksburg village. The first doctor was
James Clarkson, who came in 1827 and died in 1846. John Taylor was the
first lawyer. Samuel Goodwin said that buffalo, deer and elk would haunt
the salt licks.
FREDERICKSBURG VILLAGE.
Fredericksburg was platted by Jacob Frederick November 27, 1824.
and named in honor of its founder. He served as one of the associate
judges of Wayne county as early as 1826. The Fredericksburg Cemetery
Association was organized in 1872.
The population of this village in 1900 was five hundred and eleven.
Its business interests consisted of : The Bank, by E. Z. Aylsworth ; under-
takers, J. H. Hunter and B. S. Bontrager; general stores, S. M. Warner,
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Charles Sterling and J. B. McCormick ; hardware, Stucker & Leeper ; baker,
C. W. Smith ; butcher, J. B. Shultz ; Fredericksburg Pottery Company, plan-
ing mills, flouring mills and Ohio Terra Cotta Company. The present post-
master is C. R. Kilgore. Churches, Presbyterian, Congregational, United
Presbyterian, Methodist Episcopal and Christian.
The town and country is well cared for in the way of a first-class bank-
ing house, known as the Citizens Bank, with a capital of one hundred and
twenty-five thousand dollars individual responsibility. Its officers are : H.
W. Cary, president; A. T. Stultz. vice-president; E. Z. Aylsworth, cashier.
PAINT TOWNSHIP.
This is the extreme southeastern sub-division of Wayne county and was
organized March 5, 1816. It derives its name from the fact that a spring
existed in its territory, the water of which resembled red paint and im-
parted its peculiar color to the earth and other objects it chanced to touch. Ac-
cording to the 1900 United States census, the township contained a popula-
tion of one thousand two hundred and six. There are nowr two town plats
within Paint township, Mount Eaton and West Lebanon.
The first person to settle within the limits of Paint township was Michael
Waxier, who emigrated from Harrison county in 1810. He was a true
backwoods character, dressed in buckskin breeches, hunting shirt and moc-
casins, and usually armed wdth his scalping knife, tomahawk and rifle. As
the brave are generally generous, even so was he w^ho had the honor of first
breaking soil in this goodly part of Wayne county. He frequently hunted
with old Chief Lyon and Bill Harrison. It is told of Mr. Waxier that he
encamped one night where Winesburg is now located and barely escaped de-
struction from a gang of angry wrolves which attacked him, and to which he
offered a stout resistance until morning, having, in the meantime, killed
several, and in true Indian style, scalped them.
The next settlers in Paint township were James Sullivan, John Sprague,
David Endslev, Nathan Peticord, James Galbraith, William Vaughan,
Elijah Carr, Samuel Shull, Frederick Shull and Jacob Beals.
The first election held in the township was in 1816, and Frederick
Shull and Jacob Beals were the candidates for the office of justice of the
peace. Not many votes were cast and the result was a tie. wrhereupon the
aspirants cast lots, and Beals was the winner, hence became the first justice
of his township. He held the position twelve years.
Another character of the early days in this township was David
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Houmard, a native of Switzerland, and was among the very first emi-
grants to pass through the locks on the great Erie canal at Lockport. The
family passed through Cleveland, Ohio, when there were but about fifty
houses there, arriving in Sugarcreek township September 2, 1825. He
was seventeen weeks in coming from Switzerland. At Cleveland he bought
a yoke of oxen for thirty-six dollars which he hitched to a wagon and in
that way came to Wayne county. He remained at the Sonneberg colony
a month and settled in P&int township in May, 1826. He was a cutler by
trade, and made many curious firearms and tools. His house has been thus
described : “The original dimensions of it were twenty by thirty feet, and
it was constructed of logs, not hewed until after the house was erected. It
was composed of two rooms, the second one on the east side being nearly
square, and without being filled or mudded. Here his family, consisting of
wife and child, passed the winter of 1826 and ’27. This cabin was without
a floor, the fireplace was in the center of the room, and as companions of his
family, the cow and calf were wintered in the same room, the cabin being
house and stable both. The milk was kept in white walnut troughs,
strained through old garments and cloths and the churn was made of a
hollow cherry tree, with a board nailed on at the bottom.”
Joseph Perrott was the second Frenchman to locate in Paint township,
coming in 1829, and Emanuel Nicolet came in 1830. In 1834 immigra-
tion set in in earnest.
MOUNT EATON.
Mount Eaton, formerly styled Paintville, was platted as early as 1813
by William Vaughn and James Galbraith. Elijah Carr is supposed to have
erected the first building in the place, and Samuel Shull kept the first
tavern. The earliest minister to proclaim the gospel at this point was
Archibald Hanna, a Presbyterian, who conducted religious services for a
number of years in a tent in the big woods.
In 1829 the name Mount Eaton took the place of former Paintville.
The first incorporation election of Mount Eaton was held April 4, 1870,
when three trustees were elected as follows: J. B. Westcott, James Huston
and John Schlafly. There were forty-two votes cast at this election.
Mount Eaton had a fire company organized as early as 1861. In 1823
James Morrow operated a carding mill by horse power in Paintville. In
1827 an iron foundry was in operation there, the same being run by Weed
& Jones. In 1827-8 Joseph H. White published the Anti-Masonic Mirror ,
a weekly newspaper, which soon languished for lack of support. In 1831
the first steam grist mill at Mount Eaton was placed in running order by
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Col. William Goudy; five years later it was burned, but in 1838 was re-
built, and again destroyed in 1839 by the explosion of the boilers. In this
accident John Murphy was suddenly killed by being scalded, John Mc-
Donald was mangled, and Jeremiah Nelson and James Bradley were injured
and only survived a few days. One of the boilers was hurled fifty yards
up the hillside, splitting a sawlog in its course.
Cholera made its dread appearance at Mt. Eaton in 1833, the disease
having been brought there by a Frenchman named Benedict Brown-
stine, who, with his family, were emigrants who had a dead child — a cholera
victim — with them when they arrived. The disorder soon became malignant
in its form. David Boyd, an intoxicated man, strutted up to the wagon
to see how a cholera victim looked, and, being attacked, died the same day
before sundown. In a month twenty-six persons died of the scourge. It
made its appearance about the middle of August. Doctors Hall and Barber
did all in their power to stay its spread, but for all that every one in ten of the
population died. The last victim was James Galbraith. Many of the citi-
zens fled from the village during the epidemic.
The church and school history of Paint township is given in another
chapter.
The factors going toward making up the present business of Mount
Eaton are as follows, the same having been furnished in October, 1909.
General merchandise, A. N. Roth, E. F. Graber; hardware, S. A. Schlafly;
boots, shoes and rubbers, William Willard ; C. N. Clark, physician and
surgeon.
WEST LEBANON.
West Lebanon is situated in the extreme northeast part of the township,
three miles northeast from Mount Eaton. It was platted in 1833 by Philip
Groff and Rev. William S. Butt. Frederick Bysell, it is believed, built the
first house, run the first hotel and was postmaster. Another theory is that
Isaac Stine built the first cdbin and that the first postmaster was Adam Zar-
ing. One of the founders of this place, Philip Groff, was a native of West
Lebanon, Lebanon county, Pennsylvania, and in memory of his native town
called this village by that name.
Michael Hawn, a Revolutionary soldier, born in 1741, died in 1844,
aged one hundred and three years, and is buried in the Lutheran graveyard
at West Lebanon.
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CHAPTER XX.
Miscellaneous Subjects.
EARLY-DAY MARKET PRICES l8l8.
From the diaries and memory of John Larwill, a pioneer merchant of
Wooster, the following table of market prices is given the reader :
Coffee, per pound, sixty-two and a half cents; tea, per pound, three dol-
lars; common keg tobacco, per pound, fifty cents; coarse muslin, per yard,
fifty cents; nails (forged), eighteen to twenty cents per pound; iron, per
pound, sixteen cents; salt, per bushel, four dollars; indigo, per ounce, one
dollar; powder, per pound, one dollar.
• Other commodities were in proportion. Transportation was ten dollars
per hundred weight from Philadelphia, and three dollars and fifty cents from
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, brought in freighting wagons. It took thirty-five
days to make a trip to Wooster to Philadelphia. A teamster received one-
half of his pay before he left here and the remainder in that city. To that
city he carried furs and skins of beaver, bears, otters, coons, deer, together
with dried venison-hams, and such other commodities as were staples of ex-
change, and then brought back with him goods and wares for the Wooster
merchants. At that time a saddle of mutton could be purchased from the
Indians for a quarter of a pound of gunpowder.
MARKET QUOTATIONS FOR I909.
The following prices prevailed in this county in 1909: Coffee, twenty-
five cents; tea, fifty to seventy-five cents; tobacco, sixty cents; muslin, per
yard, ten cents for best; nails, per pound, four cents (common); iron, per
pound, four cents; salt, per bushel, eighty cents; indigo, per ounce, fifteen
cents; gunpowder, fifty cents; hogs (live weight), six to seven dollars; cattle
(beef), six to eight dollars per hundred. This will show the great contrast
in many household articles w ith the passing of years, but it should be under-
stood that during the Civil war period prices of most all the articles herein
named were much in advance of those of today.
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FIRST WHITE MAN TO DIE IN WAYNE COUNTY.
The following is an account of the first white man to die in Wayne
county, as chronicled by Ben Douglas, in 1878:
The first white man to die in this county was Alexander Crawford, a
brother of Josiah Crawford, who later in the county’s history owned the
Bahl’s Mill. Shortly after his arrival in Wooster his horse was stolen by
an Indian. He immediately started in pursuit of the savage thieves, going
on foot, which was at that time a popular method to travel. He persevered
in his search as far as Upper Sandusky, but failing to overtake or capture
them, he abandoned his pursuit. On his return he could obtain no water to
drink, save what lay in the pools in the woods and by the roots of fallen
timber, and being very dry, was compelled to slake his thirst with this green-
scummed and poisoned water. This was in 1808, and his pathway was amid
the solitudes and stolid gloom of dense and dreary woods. On his return to
Wooster, he was burning with a violent fever, when he found a stopping
place under the protecting roof of William Larwill, which proved to be his
last abode on earth. He was sick but a few days, and died in the small office
of Mr. Larwill’s store, which was situated on the grounds known now as No.
4, Emporium block. Mr. Larwill described his sufferings as being terrible.
He had no medical aid.
Near the present First Methodist Episcopal church the town site pro-
prietors had laid out a cemetery and donated it to the town. It was called
the “public graveyard.” Here Crawford’s remains were interred. John
Larwill, Benjamin Miller, William Larwill, Abraham Miller and one or two
more dug his grave and buried him. His coffin was made of rough boards
by Benjamin Miller and his son Abraham, and he was carried to his final
resting place upon spikes of wood on which his coffin rested. Later his grave
could not be identified by anyone. The sombre years have swept over it and
it casts no shadow unless upon some stricken heart. The deathground holds
him and his sleep is as sweet as if under the granite shaft.
TWO NOTED CHARACTERS, DRISKEL AND BRAWDY.
Among the noted characters who caused much trouble at a very early
time in Wayne and adjoining counties may be cited the names of the Driskels
and Brawdys.
The Driskels were settlers of Wayne county prior to 1812, but how much
earlier than this they came to Wooster and its vicinity is not known. John
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Driskel was one of the first supervisors of Wooster we have any record of,
and was acting in that capacity in the last named year. He had three broth-
ers, Dennis, William and Phenix, and a sister Sally, who married Bill Gib-
son. His family consisted of four children, Bill, Pearce. Dave and Reasin.
They emigrated from Columbiana county to Wayne county and for a time
lived on Apple creek, near the old Sibbs mill.
For a number of years after their settlement in Wayne county, old John
Driskel was regarded as an honorable old man, though much addicted to
intemperance and inclined when drunk to be quarrelsome. Dennis, his
brother, was a temperate, enterprising citizen, and bore that name wherever
known in this county. He was one of the trustees of Plain township, in com-
pany with John McBride and Abraham Runyon, and in 1829 ovVned and con-
ducted the old grist mill at Springville, in Plain township, which he sold in
1832.
For some years after he came to Wooster, John Driskel owned farms
and made realty exchanges. The first suspicion of crookedness upon him
occurred when Horace Howard was keeping the hotel called Eagle House, on
West Liberty street. A party had gathered in the bar-room one evening,
among whom was John Driskel, and the excitement becoming too boisterous,
the proprietor ejected the inmates from the premises. As Driskel went out
of the bar-room, he picked up a candlestick and carried it out of doors with
him, but it seems he immediately threw it over into Mr. Howard’s garden,
who, not knowing this, caused Driskel to be arrested next morning. Mich-
ael Totten was one of the jurors in the case. The evidence was not of that
character to evince an act of theft on the part of Driskel, and he was ac-
quitted. This was about eleven years after Driskel came to Wayne county,
and this was the first suspicion upon him and the first arrest.
Steve Brawdy, a brother-in-law of William, a brother of John Driskel,
was sentenced to the penitentiary from Wooster for stealing a heifer from
Jacob Shellbarger, at Naftzger’s mill. The warrant for his arrest was issued
by Squire Bristow, and Jacob Crawford, constable of Congress township,
assisted by Michael Totten and Moses Loudon, arrested him. Brawdy was
a strong and powerful man and in the melee a knife was plunged into Loud-
on’s thigh the full length of its blade, but which only made Loudon the more
determined and Mr. Totten and the constable the more resolute. He was
taken before Squire Bristow, had a hearing, was bound over, received his
trial at Wooster, and was sentenced to three years’ confinement in the Ohio
penitentiary. The fact of Brawdy’s relationship to the Driskels induced many
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suspicions and the vigilance of the citizens and the officers soon led to the
discovery of a gang in which John Driskel was the central actor.
About this time General Beall had a yoke of oxen stolen and taken to
Cleveland and sold. A young man, Ben Worthington, was arrested and
tried for this offense and sent to the penitentiary. The revelations of this
trial established the complicity of Driskel and Brawdy with the Worthington
theft.
John Driskel was finally arrested for stealing horses in Columbiana
county, Ohio, and brought back from Beaver county, Pennsylvania, where he
was caught, and was tried and found guilty and sentenced from New Lisbon
to the penitentiary. This was along about 1829-30. He, however, managed
to make his escape, the particulars of the same being as follows: Convicts
were at that date permitted to labor, under guard, on the public works at
Columbus. Driskel, with a chain and a fifty-six pound weight fastened to
his leg, had charge of a wheelbarrow and was conveying dirt on the Ohio
canal. He concluded he would make an effort to escape, and, picking up the
ball in his hand, started to run and was immediately fired upon by six guards,
who unfortunately missed him. He had shrewdly selected a period well on
toward night for his escape. Arriving at a farm residence, he sought the
wood pile and there finding an ax, severed the ball from the chain. Having
dispensed with the ball and chain, he leisurely made his way back to Wayne
county, to where his family lived, near Burbank, where he filed the clasp of the
chain from his leg.
Mr. Totten afterward said he frequently heard him relate how he effected
his escape. The cutting off of the iron ball by the farmer’s ax, and the filing
of the chain, etc., Driskel would tell of it and laugh over it until his voice
might be heard a half mile.
The authorities hearing of his appearance in Wayne county, an effort
was made to recapture him, when, to elude his pursuers, he led for a time a
roving life, stealing horses, concealing them in thickets, burning barns, houses
and other things, finally leaving the county. Shortly after this he was cap-
tured in Mohican township, Ashland county, and committed to the charge of
two men. named Peterson, to take him back to the Columbus penitentiary to
serve out his sentence, but when stopping over night at Sunbury, Delaware
county, the old man by shrewdness and force effected his escape and never
again appeared in Ohio. He was next heard of in the West, where his fam-
ily and confederates joined him and continued their criminal pursuits for
some years. In time, the “Regulators” of northern Illinois rose upon them.
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captured old John, his son William and others of the gang. These were im-
mediately shot and his youngest son David was soon afterward caught and
hanged to a tree by judge “Lynch.”
It is the opinion of Mr. Totten that this band of outlaws composed of
the Driskels, Brawdys and others originated in Wayne county and this is like-
wise corroborated by the statement of Hon. L. O'Dell, of Clinton township,
one of the most intelligent of the early settlers of Wayne county. They had
no long or settled residence at any point in the county, living at different times
in Wooster, Wayne, Chester, Congress and Plain townships. They were a
gang of bad, bold and dangerous men and desperadoes, a terror to peaceful
and law-abiding citizens, whom even-handed justice pursued slowly, but
finally visited with most fearful retribution. They were men of invincible
courage, of powerful physical strength, and enjoyed nothing so well as a
carouse and a knock-down. Their leading crimes consisted in burglaries,
incendiarisms and horse stealing. They concealed their stolen horses in the
dense thickets of the woods, stole corn from the farmers to feed them, and at
a suitable opportunity run them out of the county.
Old John Driskel was a blustering, swaggering, bullying character, and
when drunk was constantly provoking disturbances and putting society into a
ferment of alarm and apprehension. Few men whom he encountered were
his equals in the brutal conflicts which he induced. On the occasion of a
public muster in Lisbon, Columbiana county, he became terribly boisterous and
flung his banter to the assembled crowd. Like Caleb Quoten in the “Wags
of Windsor,” he was bound to have a place in the reviews. Timid men feared
him and stouter desired to avoid collision with him. Driskel's rule was if
he could not provoke a quarrel by general boasting and threats, to select a
large musclar man and challenge him to a fight. And if he refused to accept,
to hit him at the time or watch for another chance and deliver a blow upon
him.
On this occasion, Driskel selected Isaac Pew, a large, bony specimen of a
man, and after offering him sundry indignities, and without any warning,
hit him a terrible blow. Springing instantly upon him, he bit off Pew's ear.
This occurred at the tavern at Lisbon, then kept by Christian Smith, one of
the associate judges of Wayne county at one time. Pew was a man who kept
his own secrets and felt amply able to defend himself against Driskel, or any-
body else, if he had a fair showing. When next general muster came around,
Driskel was present, as was also Pew, the latter having remarked, “He has
my ear and now I will have his nose.” Seeing Driskel. he approached him.
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but suspecting his intentions, Driskel retreated and Pew followed him closely.
He was interrupted by Bill Driskel, John’s brother, but rushing past Bill and
John, seeing he was about to be caught, turned about, when Pew instantly
sprang at old John and bit his nose off.
On a certain occasion, old John was parading the streets of Wooster,
talking boisterously and bragging that he weighed two hundred and eight
pounds and that no man could whip him. Smith Mclntire, who was clearing
off some land on the Robison farm, south of Wooster, came to town in his
shirt sleeves to procure tobacco. Being a very muscular looking man. Gen-
eral Spink and Mr. McComb approached him and asked him if the thought
he could whip that man, pointing to Driskel. Mclntire said, “I can whip
anybody, but I don’t know that man and I am a stranger here and, more than
that, I am a peaceful man.” Whereupon he started back to his work, when
Spink and McComb called to him to return. He obeyed and after some en-
treaty consented to whip Driskey, upon the consideration of preserving quiet
and establishing order. Spink remarked to Driskel pointing to Mclntire,
that he had not yet whipped him, when Driskel rapidly advanced toward him
and said, “You think you can handle me,” to which Mclntire responded, “I
do.” Driskel said, “Well, let us take a drink and then to business.” Mclntire
responded, “I want nothing to drink.” Driskel took his drink and faced
Mclntire and when the word “Ready” was given, Mclntire hit one blow that
knocked him insensible and so serious was the result that Doctor Bissell had
to be called and it was several hours before he rallied from the prostration.
Not satisfied with this encounter, in a short time afterwards he challenged
Mclntire to a second test, which the latter accepted, having General Spink
and Col. James Hindman for his seconds, Driskel choosing for his backers
one of his sons and his son-in-law, Brawdy. The contestants met and with
a similar result. Mclntire. after his adversary was on the floor, picked him
up like a toy and started with him toward the fireplace, exclaiming. “I will
make a burnt offering of him,” but his rash purpose was prevented. This
fight occurred in the bar room of Nailor’s tavern.
WEATHER AND CROPS YEARS AGO.
In 1 8 1 6 the pioneers of Wayne county gathered their wheat in July,
the weather being exceedingly cool for summer.
1817. — A frost visited Ohio June 1st, completely destroying the fruit
and killing the verdure of the orchards and forest trees.
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1825. — May 1 8th the terrific “Burlington storm” swept over Delaware,
Licking. Knox and Coshocton counties, the most violent tornado that ever
visited Ohio.
183$- — November 13th of this year, the “stars fell.” It was a copious
shower and meteoric tramps tumbled through the heavens and popped earth-
ward in prodigal confusion.
1834. — A frost occurred on May nth, materially injuring the wheat
crop.
1835. — Heavy rains fell during the summer, submerging the bottoms and
rendering tillage impossible. Hay crops were seriously damaged and cat-
tle died from eating it. A comet was observed this year.
1841. — An unusually violent snow storm May 2d.
1843. — July 2 1 st, severe frosts.
1845. — Frosts appeared May 7th and 25th, destroying the wheat crop
of that year.
1854-55. — The winter of these years will long be remembered. Snow
covered the ground thirteen weeks in succession. The month of May, 1855,
was remarkably dry, but from the 10th to the 17th of June of this year will
not be forgotten in history for its remarkable floods.
1855. — On December 24th it began to snow and from this date until the
last of March the sleighing remained excellent, the snow covering the earth
until about the 20th of April. Forest and fruit trees were killed, and since
the first settlement of the country no winter presented so grim wrinkled a
front.
1859. — What is known as the “June frost” of this year was a sad visi-
tation upon northern Ohio. June 5, 1859, on Sunday morning, the face of
the earth looked as though a sheet of living flame had smitten the vegetation
that covered its hills and valleys.
1873-74. — The winter of these years is worthy of special mention. On
January 6 and 7, 1874, occurred the “great ice storm,” which must be dis-
tinguished for its destructive effects upon the forests of the country.
1877. — The mercury stood at Christmas time eighty to one hundred de-
grees in the sun. The nights were balmy and frostless.
ADAM POE, THE INDIAN FIGHTER.
The terrible encounter of the Poe brothers — Andrew and Adam — with
the stalwart chief, Bigfoot. occupies a conspicuous page in the annals of our
border strifes. It should contribute a most interesting feature to the history
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of Wavne county, that we are able to furnish with accuracy the brief sketch of
the brother Adam, who for over twelve years was a citizen of this county.
His sons were among the earliest of the pioneer band in Congress township
and made the first improvements in that section, as well as having been a
pioneer of 1813 in the town of Wooster.
The following narrative of this incident was written up and published
many years since by that most accurate historian, Ben Douglas, and he gained
his knowledge from Mrs. Kuffel, who was the daughter of Adam Poe, who
was in the encounter with Bigfoot, and reads as follows :
A body of seven Wyandots made a raid upon the settlement of whites
on the Ohio river, near Fort Pitt, and, finding an old man in a cabin, killed
him, stole all they could and withdrew. The news of the murder spread
rapidly and my father, Adam Poe, and Uncle Andrew, together with half a
dozen neighbors, began pursuit of them, determined to visit sudden death
upon them. They followed the Indians all night, but not until morning did
they get close upon them, when they discovered a path or trail leading to the
river.
My uncle Andrew, who, like my father, was a strong man and always
on the lookout, did not directly advance to the river, but left his comrades
and stealthily crept through the thicket, to avoid any ruse of the Indians and
if possible surprise them. He at once detected evidences of their presence at
the river, but not seeing them he crept quietly down to its bank, with his gun
fixed to fire. He had not far descended when he espied Bigfoot and a little
Indian with him, both of whom had guns and stood watching along the river
in the direction whence the remainder of the party were. He (Andrew) now
concluded to shoot Bigfoot, and fired at him, but his gun did not discharge
its contents. The situation instantly became terrific.
The snapping of the gun alarmed the Indians, who, looking around, dis-
covered Andrew. It was too late for him to run and I doubt if he would
have retreated if he could, for he was a great wrestler and coveted conflict
with the Indians. So he dropped his gun and bounded from where he stood
and caught both the Indians and thrust them upon the ground. Though he
fell uppermost in the struggle, he found the grip of Bigfoot to be of iron,
and as a consequence the little Indian soon extricated himself and instantly
seized his tomahawk and advanced with fatal purpose toward Andrew. To
better assist the little Indian, who had the tomahawk aimed at the head of
Andrew, Bigfoot hugged and held him with a giant’s grasp, but Andrew
threw up his foot and kicked the tomahawk out of the Indian’s hand. This
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made Bigfoot indignant at the little savage, who soon repeated his experi-
ment with the tomahawk, indulging in numerous feints, before he delivered
the main blow, which Andrew parried from his head and received upon his
wrist.
Andrew now, by a desperate endeavor, wrenched himself from the
clutches of Bigfoot and, seizing the gun from one of the savages, shot the
little Indian. Bigfoot, regaining his upright position, got Andrew in his
grasp and hurled him down upon the bank, but instantly he arose, when the
second encounter occurred, the issue of which threw them both into the water
and the struggle now was for the one to drown the other. Andrew finally
caught Bigfoot by the hair and plunged him in the water, holding him there
until he imagined he was drowned, a conclusion in which he was sadly mis-
taken. Bigfoot was only playing off and soon recovered and was ready for a
second encounter. The current of the river had by this time borne them into
the deeper water, when it became necessary to disengage themselves and seek
to escape immediate destruction.
A mutual effort was at once made to reach the shore and get possession
of a gun and close the struggle with powder and lead. Bigfoot was a glib
swimmer and was first to reach the bank. In this contingency, Andrew
wheeled about and swam farther out into the river to avoid if possible being
shot, by diving strategies. The big chief, lucklessly to him, seized the un-
loaded gun with which Andrew had shot the little Indian. Meantime Adam
Poe, having missed his brother and hearing his shot, inferred he was either
killed or in a fight with the Indians and hastened toward him. Adam now be-
ing discovered by Andrew, the latter called to the former to shoot Bigfoot.
Unfortunately Ad?m’s gun was empty, as was the big Indian’s. The strife
was now between the two as to who could load the quickest, but Bigfoot, in his
haste, drew his ramrod too violently from his gun thimbles, wThen it was
thrown from his hands and was sent some distance. He rapidly recovered,
but the accident gave Adam the advantage, when he shot Bigfoot as he was
in the act of drawing his gun upon him.
Having disposed of Bigfoot and seeing his brother, who was wounded,
floating in the river, he instantly sprang into the water to assist him, but
Andrew, desiring the scalp of the great chief, called to Adam to scalp him,
that he could save himself and reach the shore. Adam’s anxiety for his
brother was too intense to obey the mandate and Bigfoot, determined not to
let his scalp be counted among the trophies of his antagonist, in the horrid
pangs of death, rolled into the river and his carcass was swrept from the eye
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of man forever. Andrew, however, when in the stream made another nar-
row escape from death, for just as Adam arrived at the bank for his pro-
tection, one of the number who came after him mistook Andrew for an Indian
and shot at him, the bullet striking him in the shoulder, causing a severe
wound, from which in course of time he recovered.
So that it was my Uncle Andrew that had the wrestle on the bank with
Bigfoot and the struggle in the river with him, and it was my father, Adam
Poe, who shot Bigfoot when he came ashore. The wound that my father
received he got in the fight with the body of six Indians who were over-
taken, five of whom were killed, with a loss of three of their pursuers and
the hurt done to my father.
The locality on the Ohio river where the struggle occurred is in Vir-
ginia, almost opposite to the mouth of Little Yellow creek.
POE WHIPS FIVE INDIANS.
While living on this side of the Ohio, two Indians crossed the river,
both of whom were intoxicated, and came to Adam Poe’s house. After
various noisy demonstrations, but without doing any one harm, they re-
tired a short distance and under the shade of a tree sat down and finally
went to sleep. In the course of two hours, after they awoke from their
drunken slumbers, they discovered that their rifles were missing, when they
immediately returned to Poe’s house and, after inquiring for their guns
and being told they knew nothing about them, they boldly accused him of
stealing them and insolently demanded them. Poe was apprehensive of
trouble and, turning his eyes in the direction whence they came, discovered
three more Indians approaching.
Without manifesting any symptoms of surprise or alarm, Poe coolly
withdrew to his house and, saying to his wife, “There is fight and more fun
ahead,” told her to hasten to the cornfield near by with the children and
there hide. This being accomplished, he seized his gun and confronted the
five Indians, who were then in the yards surrounding the house and trying
to force open the door. He at once discovered that the two Indians who
came first had not found their guns, and that the other three were unarmed.
So he dropped his gun, as he did not want to kill any of them, unless he had
to, and then attacked them with his fists. After a hand-to-hand encounter,
lasting ten minutes, he crushed them to the earth in one promiscuous heap,
and, having thus vanquished and subdued them, seized them one at a time
and threw them over the fence and out of the yard.
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CONCERNING ADAM POE'S DEATH.
After leaving Pennsylvania, Adam Poe removed to the West Fork of
Little Beaver, in Wayne township, Columbiana county, where he entered
several quarters of land. From that county he removed to Wayne county,
in 1813, bringing with him his wife and youngest son David and his daugh-
ter Catherine. He first settled in Wooster, on North Market street, and
he followed the business of shoemaking for three years. He was then nearly
seventy years of age. He was by trade a tanner and an excellent shoemaker.
He then removed to Congress township and there bought sixty acres of land
from his son, George Poe, and there he resided for almost twelve years,
when, growing old and infirm, he removed to Stark county, where, with his
son Andrew he died. He was a member of the old Lutheran church.
Mrs. Kuffel relates this concerning his death: A great and enthu-
siastic political meeting was being held in Massillon. The crowd, hearing
Adam Poe, who had killed the celebrated Indian, Bigfoot, lived but a few
miles distant, dispatched a delegation after him. When he appeared on
the ground he was wonderfully lionized and made the hero of the day. He
was caught and carried through the crowd on the shoulders of the excited
multitude. As old as he was. being past ninety, he had as much pluck as any
of the boys.
That day of excitement, however, sounded the death knell of the mighty
borderer, the iron-nerved, heroic Adam Poe. He returned from the political
meeting prostrated, enfeebled and sick and soon thereafter died. A son
of Andrew Poe, at whose house Adam died, hurried to the residence of Mrs.
Kuffel, at Congress, to inform her of the dangerous illness of her father. She
received the news about nine o’clock and, being then forty-seven years of age,
mounted a horse and rode through the darkness and over uncertain roads,
reaching her father’s only in time to see him, to whom this w orld had no ter-
rors, succumb to the king of terrors and the terror of kings.
WAYNE COUNTY MAN HUNG LINCOLN CONSPIRATORS.
Gen. Thomas T. Dill, who was born in Wayne county, Ohio, in 1842,
and who served in the Union army during the Civil war for a term of five
years, had charge of the troops who were detailed to execute President Lin-
coln’s assassins, in the prison yard in Washington. District of Columbia, on
July 9, 1865. Three details of men had to be selected before any could be
(26)
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secured who would cut down the body of Mrs. Serratt, which woman har-
bored Booth in her home the day before Lincoln was shot by him. Dill was
also present when Booth’s body was placed under the corner of the Arsenal,
beneath the floor. Later it was moved to the family burial place of the Booth
family.
General Dill died in November, 1905.
SALT WORKS ON THE KILLBUCK IN 1815.
At an early day in Wayne county and all northern Ohio the most coveted
commodity sought for among all classes was salt. Prices ran from sixteen
dollars to twenty dollars per barrel. This could not long be endured, so with
the genuine enterprise and pluck of pioneers a project was set on foot to
obviate freighting salt so long a distance as from Pittsburg and some of it
was carried from points on the Ohio to Coshocton, at the head of the Muskin-
gum, thence to Walhonding, and tugging it up the Killbuck in dug-outs and
pirogues, as did Benjamin Jones and the triple-nerved William Totten. To
bore for salt in this county was the scheme sought out and carried forth to a
successful completion.
March 5, 1815, Joseph Eichar commenced this task. He went down
with a chisel-shaped auger to the depth of four hundred and sixty-five feet
and salt water was obtained and the product of salt was sought in great
quantities at first, but the flow did not last long and the works were aban-
doned. We draw the following from an old letter furnished by Mrs. Joseph
Lake, of New York, daughter of Joseph Eichar:
“One of the greatest obstacles they met with in boring was the striking
of a strong vein of oil, a spontaneous outburst, which shot up as high as the
tops of the surrounding tree-tops. One of the workmen dropped a coal of fire
into it and in less than a minute everything was a roaring blaze. The men
became terribly frightened and Jim McClarran struck a bee-line for Wooster,
without hat or coat, for, said he, ‘we have struck through to the lower regions,
and it looks as though we had set the world on fire.' “
The fire was later extinguished and a bottle of the oil sent to Dr.
Townsend, who pronounced it a “wonderful phenomena” — it was doubtless
petroleum oil, but that article was then unknown to the world. The whole
surface of Killbuck creek was covered with the oil. This mixture of oil and
salt was not what the people wanted and soon the new-found salt works on
Killbuck were abandoned for all time.
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POPULATION OF WAYNE COUNTY.
Herewith is the census enumeration for Wayne county, by decades, and
its population by townships and precincts, towns and cities, according to the
last United States census, 1900:
BY DECADES.
In 1810 the population was 332; 1820, 11,993; 1830, 23,327; 1840,
36,015; 1850, 32,681; i860, 32,438; 1870, 35,116; 1880, 40,036; 1890,
39>oo5; 1900, 37,870.
POPULATION BY TOWNSHIPS AND CITIES, I9OO.
Chippewa Township 2,93 7
Canaan Township 2,401
Congress Township 2,407
Chester Township 1,648
Clinton Township 2,028
Baughman Township 2,497
Greene Township 3,3 1 8
East Union Township 1,805
City of Wooster 6,063
Franklin Township 1,201
Paint Township 1,276
Plain Township 1,666
Wayne Township 1,711
Salt Creek Township 1,556
Sugar Creek Township 2,274
Wooster Township 7, 160
Milton Township 1,978
CITY, TOWN AND VILLAGE POPULATION.
Applecreek
• 357
Burbank
325 Mount Eaton . . .
... 232
Congress
198 Orrville
. . .1,901
Creston
• . .1.043
Dalton
666 Smithville
• ... 4
••• 473
Fredericksburg
, ... 650
Doylestown
. . .6,063
CITY OF WOOSTER BY WARDS.
First ward, 1,102; second ward, 2,227; third ward, 1,211; fourth ward,
839; fifth ward, 684.
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VILLAGE PLATS OF THE COUNTY.
There have been almost fifty villages platted within Wayne county
since its organization. The following is a list of a large per cent, of the
plattings :
Aukerman, in Congress township, platted.
Amwell (Sterling), in Milton township, platted January, 1880.
Apple Creek Station. East Union township, April n, 1854.
Austen, “Hamlet,' ” Plain township, December 7, 1894.
Burbank (Bridgeport), Canaan township, December 3, 1868.
Burton City (Fairview), Baughman township, December 14, 1850.
Blachleyville, Plain township, December 16, 1833.
Bloomington (near Wooster), Wayne township. July 3, 1907.
Canaan, Canaan township.
Chippewa, Chippewa township. May, 1816.
Congress ( Waynesburg), Congress township, March 6, 1827.
Creston. Canaan township, June 30, 1881 (known as Saville Station in
i865}-
Cedar Valley, Chester township.
Centerville, Clinton township, March 5, 1851.
Dalton (Dover), Sugar Creek township, October 16, 1817.
Doylestown, Chippewa township, December 9, 1827.
Edinburg, East Union township, August 16, 1822.
Fairview, Baughman township, December 14, 1850.
Fredericksburg, Salt Creek township, 1843.
Jefferson, Plain township, June 30, 1829.
Lattasburg (West Union), Chester township, February, 1851.
Milton Station (Rittman), Milton township. 1869.
Millbrook. Plain and Clinton townships. August 10, 1829.
Moscow, Sugar Creek township, 1815, vacated 1878.
Madison (first county seat), Wooster township, vacated 1814.
Marshallville. Baughman and Chippewa townships, February 7, 1817.
Mount Eaton (Paintville), Paint township. 1813.
Moreland, Franklin township, January t 7. 1829.
Madisonburg, Wayne township. 1873.
New Pittsburg. Chester township. May 6, 1829.
Overton, Chester township.
Orville. Greene and Baughman townships. September 9. 1864.
Pleasant Home. Congress township.
Rittman Station, Milton township. 1869.
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Reedsburg, Plain township, December 23, 1835.
Seville, May, 1865.
Slankersville, Chippewa township, February 24, 1843.
Springville, Plain township, December 16, 1844.
Shreve, Clinton township, 1853.
Smithville, Greene township, 1831.
Sterling (Russell), Milton township, January 21, 1880.
Wooster (original), Wooster township, September 7, 1816.
West Lebanon, Paint township, 1833.
West Salem, Congress township, June 13, 1834.
West Union (Lattasburg), Chester township, 1854.
INDIANS CAUSE POWDER EXPLOSION.
Howe in his “Historic Collections’’ mentions a singular incident as
having occurred in a small building near or adjoining the old Stibbs mills,
built in 1809 near Wooster. This building had been fitted up for a small
general store, such as would accommodate the settlers and the few remain-
ing bands of Indians. It was managed by Michael Switzer. In this store
were William Smith, Hugh Moore, Jesse Richards, J. H. Larwill and five or
six Indians. Switzer was in the act of weighing out some gunpowder from
an eighteen-pound keg, while the Indians were quietly smoking their pipes,
filled with a mixture of tobacco, sumach leaves and kinnikinnick, or yellow
willow bark, when a puff of wind coming in at the open window blew a spark
of fire from one of their pipes into the powder. A terrific explosion occurred.
The roof of the building was blown off and carried a long distance, the
sides fell out, the joists came to the floor and the door and chimney alone
were left. Switzer died in a few minutes; Smith was blown through the
mill and badly injured; Richards and the Indians were also badly hurt and
seriously burned. Larwill, who happened to be standing against the chimney,
escaped with little or no harm, except, like all the rest, his face was well
blackened and he was knocked down by the shock.
The Indians, fearful of being accused of causing the accident intention-
ally, some days later called a council of citizens for an investigation, which
was held on the bottom, on Christmas run, west of Wooster.
THE FULLER SISTERS.
Among the literary characters produced in Wayne county should not be
forgotten the names of two sisters — Frances and Metta Fuller — whose com-
bined poems were compiled within one joint volume. The former was a
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native of Rome, New York, while the latter was born in Erie, Pennsylvania.
In 1839 the family removed to Wooster, when Metta was but a babe of but
a few months old. At the age of fourteen Frances was supplying the local
press with gems of poetry and prose. She rose rapidly and soon established
a reputation in the literary world. Willis and Morris, of the Home Journal,
a popular literary paper of New York city, containing sweet stanzas of her
writings, pronounced her as among the most brilliant of women writers.
Edgar Allen Poe, famous as author of the “Raven,” classed her with the
most imaginative of American poets. In 1853 she married Jackson Barrett,
of Pontiac, Michigan, to which state she removed. Later she moved to the
Pacific coast where “rolls the Oregon.” She did not live happily and was
divorced and later married a Mr. Victor, brother to the husband of her sister
Metta. In that far-away clime she improved in her literary tastes and did
most excellent work.
Metta, like her sister, attended the schools of Wooster, and at fifteen
years of age composed a romance founded upon the supposed history of the
dead cities of Yucatan, entitled “The Last Days of Tul.” Metta’s nom de
plume was the “Singing Sybil.” She grew to be a woman of charming
graces and wonderful endowments highly improved upon. “The Senator’s
Son,” a plea for the Maine law, written at the age of twenty, had an ex-
tensive sale both at home and in foreign lands. She married, in July, 1856,
O. J. Victor and removed to New York city where for many years she fol-
lowed literary work with success. One of her poems was “Body and Soul,”
one stanza of which reads :
“A living soul came to the world —
Whence came it? Who can tell?
Of where that soul went forth again.
When it bade the earth farewell?
A body it had this spirit knew
And the body was given a name.”
No less authority than the celebrated N. P. Willis wrote concerning this
Wooster girl after this fashion :
“We suppose ourselves to be throwing no shade of disparagement upon
anyone in declaring that in the ‘Singing Sybil,' her not less gifted sister, we
discern more unquestionable marks of true genius, and a greater portion of
the unmistakable inspiration of true poetic art than in any of the lady min-
strels— delightful and splendid as some of them have been — that we have
heretofore ushered to the applause of the public. One in spirit, and equal in
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genius, the most interesting and brilliant ladies — both still in their youth —
are undoubtedly destined to occupy a very distinguished and permanent place
among the native authors of this land.”
AN AMERICAN “OLE BULL.”
Wooster produced Alf Howard and he became the American violinist
— named “America’s Ole Bull.” He was the son of Horace Howard and
brother to Harvey, Charles and William Howard, of Wooster. He died aged
fifty years, in February, 1873, a* Prophetstown, Illinois. He was a man of
a phenomenal musical genius. Early in life, even before his tenth summer
had passed, he developed a peculiar fondness for instrumental music. At the
age of fifteen he went to Detroit, Michigan, engaged as a dry-goods clerk,
but soon repaired to Niles, Michigan, where he conceived his niche in life
and at once set about developing his talents. He organized a troupe and
appeared before many western audiences beyond the Mississippi river. In
1841 he joined the June, Turner & Company circus, with which he traveled
one season, then returned to Wooster. Here he formed a minstrel company,
traveled throughout the entire West and finally, like a shining star, appeared
suddenly in Philadelphia, where he was first known as the “Ole Bull” of this
continent. After 1844 he was connected with Barnum’s show of New York,
where, with his single violin, he drew immense throngs of music-loving peo-
ple. He next went to the Old World, where he sought and won great musical
fame as a violinist. After coming home, he traveled and played in almost
every state in this country. He made money fast, but this was not his aim —
it being rather to entertain and excel in his chosen profession.
“johnny appleseed.”
Jonathan Chapman, better known as “Johnny Appleseed,” was bom in
Boston, Massachusetts, about 1775, and become somewhat of a noted char-
acter in Wayne county, Ohio. As a fruit grower and early-day nurseryman,
he was celebrated. Hon. John H. James, of Urbana, Ohio, in an address
before the Cincinnati Horticultural Society many years ago, had this to re-
late of him :
“I saw him first in 1826, and have since learned something of his history.
He came to my office in Urbana, bearing a letter from Alexander Kimmont.
The letter spoke of him as a man generally styled ‘J°hnny Appleseed’ and
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that he might desire some counsel about a nursery he had in Champaign
county. His case was this : Some years after he had planted a nursery on
the land of a person who gave him leave to do so, he was told the land
had been sold, and was now in other hands, and that the present owner might
not recognize his right to the trees. He did not seem to be very anxious
about it, and continued walking to and fro as he talked, and at the same time
continued eating nuts. Having advised him to go and see the person that
he might have no difficulty, the conversation turned. I asked him about
the nursery, and whether the trees were grafted. He answered ‘no’ rather
decidedly, and said that the proper and natural mode was to raise fruit trees
from the seed.
“In 1801 he came into the Territory with a horse load of appleseeds,
gathered from cider presses in western Pennsylvania. The seeds were con-
tained in leather bags, which were better suited for his journey than linen
sacks. He came first to Licking county, Ohio, where he planted his seeds. I
am able to say that it was on the farm of Isaac Stadden. In this instance, as
in others afterwards, he would clear a spot for the purpose and make some
light enclosures. He would then return for more seeds and select other sites
for new nurseries. When the trees were ready for sale, he left them in
charge of some one to sell for him. at a low price, which was seldom if ever
paid in money. If persons were too poor to pay they received the trees free.
Nearly all of the nurseries in Licking county were planted from his nursery.
He also had numerous nurseries in Knox, Richland and Wayne counties.
“It is claimed that on the remote borders of Chester and Congress town-
ships he scattered seeds, and that some of the earliest orchards of that settle-
ment were produced from his nurseries. One thing is certain, that his nurser-
ies in Wayne county prior to the establishment of the county of Ashland
supplied the pioneers of that and adjacent counties with the settings of their
future orchards. In East Union township there is no doubt that this fanatical
wanderer located one of the nurseries. On Little Sugar creek, near the resi-
dence of David Carr, he selected the site, which a hundred years ago, in the
primal silence of its wild environments, must have been poetically picturesque.
“On account of superstition among the Indians, and as he dressed in
a fantastic manner and seemed to interpret their strange dreams for them,
they were all his fast friends. They looked upon him as a great white medi-
cine man. During the war of 1812, when the other settlers on the frontier
were harassed and butchered by the Indians, he pursued the even tenor of
his ways, undisturbed by the brutal savages. He, being in their confidence,
gained many points which benefited the whites, whom he warned to flee when
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danger seemed lurking near. At the time of Hull's surrender, Johnny Chap-
man rode day and night to herald the disaster and admonish the people to
flee for safety and life. Indeed he was an odd, but humane man. He dis-
liked to injure or kill even the least insect, or reptile, or bird of the forest.
Kind, true to man and beast, endowed with genius and intellect far above the
average person, it is no wonder that newspapers and state historians have
ever kept publishing details of his half nomadic, half civilized life. He died
in Allen county, Ohio, in the summer of 1847, aged seventy-two years, forty-
six of which had been consecrated to his self-imposed mission, of giving out
apple seeds and doing self-sacrificing deeds for his fellow pioneers. Peace
to his ashes!"
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CHAPTER XXI.
THE CITY OF WOOSTER.
Wooster, the county seat of Wayne county, so named by Hon. Joseph
H. Larwill in honor of Major-Gen. David Wooster, of Revolutionary war
fame and a member of a celebrated colonial family, is situated at neatly the
center of the county, within Wooster township, and is three hundred and
seventy-seven feet above Lake Erie. It was made the seat of justice May
30, 1811, having been platted by John Bever, William Henry and Joseph
H. Larwill in the autumn of 1808.
Wooster was not the original county seat of Wayne county. The
place designated as such by the first commissioners was on the elevated land
lying southeast of the city of today and on lands owned then by Bazaleel
Wells & Company, and was called Madison. This not suiting a majority
of the citizens, the Legislature appointed new commissioners, when the
present Wooster was selected for the county seat. Only a single log cabin
had been erected on the site of Madison. The toWnsite proprietors had
sold some few town lots in Madison, but after the change was made they
at once refunded the money paid for same to the purchasers. John Good-
enow, their attorney, applied to the court on February 21, 1814, to legally
vacate Madison, which was done in April, 1814.
Wooster is forty-two miles south of Cleveland and is within one of the
richest, most fertile portions of Ohio. It is the seat of Wooster University
and the Ohio State Experimental Station. Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, is one
hundred and thirty-five miles to the east, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, one hun-
dred and eighty-five miles to the west, while Cincinnati, Ohio, is two hundred
and thirty-nine miles south and Chicago Illinois, is three hundred and thirty-
four miles to the west.
The earliest settlers in Wooster were brothers, William, Joseph and
John Larwill, who came in 1808.
The first house erected in the town, and Wayne county as well, was a
log cabin on East Liberty street, directly west of what was later designated
as the William Larwill property. The tools employed in the construction
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of this pioneer “temple” were a broad-ax and drawing-knife. It was raised
at the time the town was being laid out, and its first occupants were William
Larwill and a young man named Abraham Miller, whose father, Benjamin
Miller, removed in the spring of 1809 from Stark county, with his wife
and family, and opened a house of entertainment.
The first married man who settled in Wayne county, or Wooster, was
Benjamin Miller, who also kept the first tavern in the county, on land where
later stood the J. B. Power dry goods store. Mr. and Mrs. Miller were also
honored by being the parents of the first white child born in town and
county. It was a daughter and was christened Tillie Miller, the honor of
naming her being bestowed upon Hon. John Bever. She attained woman-
hood and married John Lawrence, father-in-law of the pioneer editor, Joseph
Clingan, by which union there resulted seven children, one of whom became a
distinguished Disciple minister.
The first attempt at merchandise in Wooster was the opening of a gen-
eral store by William Larwill.
The first brick house in town was built in 1810 by John Bever, on the
corner subsequently occupied by J. S. Bissell & Brother, dry goods mer-
chants. This was also the first brick structure of Wayne county.
The first wagon road cut through the dense timber in this county was
the one from Wooster to Massillon in 1808.
The first state road running through the county, from Canton to
Wooster, was laid out by the commissioners in 1810.
The first mill for grinding purposes in the vicinity was built at Wooster
in 1809 by Joseph Stibbs, then a resident of Canton.
In 1811 Hon. Benjamin Jones left Youngstown, Ohio, passed through
Wooster and on to Mansfield, in search of a location for “Priest” Jones. He
finally selected Wooster and so reported to the “Priest.” The following
year the Priest Jones family came on, bringing with them goods, and started
a store in a rough wooden building erected by Robert McClarran.
The first carpenter of the town was Robert McClarran, who was also
the first justice of the peace in the town and county.
It is believed that the first white man to die in Wooster was Alex.
Crawford, in 1808.
The first resident lawyer, who died in Wooster, was a Mr. Raymond.
The first physician in Wooster was Thomas Townsend, as early as
1813. The first in Wayne county was Dr. Ezekiel Wells, of East Union.
The first minister of the gospel was Rev. Thomas G. Jones — “Priest”
Jones — who was a Baptist and arrived in 1812, and this denomination erected
the first church building. The date was 1814.
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The first school teacher was Carlos Mather, a young lawyer of New
Haven, Connecticut, who taught in 1814.
The first postmaster in Wooster was “Priest” Jones.
The first school house — a brick — was built on the site of the third ward
school building of later days.
The first Fourth of July celebration in Wooster, or Wayne county,
was west of town on Christmas's run, the water for cooking purposes being
procured from a spring at the base of the hill, on land later owned by Judge
Downing. The dinner was under the supervision of William Hughes; the
Declaration of Independence was read by James Hindman, and ‘'Priest"
Jones made the oration.
The first mail from Wooster, New Lisbon and Mansfield was carried by
Rensselaer Curtis.
The first will on record in the county recorder's office was made by
Frederick Brown, of East Union township.
The first real estate transfer recorded at Wooster is from Oliver Day
to Elam Day, of East Union township.
The first court of common pleas was held in Wooster in 1812.
The first election held in Wooster was on the first Monday in April,
1810. The subjoined is a list of the electors: Josiah Crawford, Jesse
Cornelius, Jacob Matthews, William Larwill, Addy Chest, Robert Carn,
Benjamin Miller, Jacob Wetzel, Luke Miller, Samuel Martin, Matthew Riley,
John Driskel, William Smith, John Rodgers, John Wright, Christian Smith,
Joseph Hughes and William Riter.
The first fire company in Wooster was established in 1827.
The first town watchman was Frederick Kauke, assisted by Joseph Ber-
gen, in 1829, at a salary of eleven dollars per month.
When Wooster was first settled there were no white inhabitants between
it and the Great Lakes; on the west none nearer than Maumee, Fort Wayne
and Vincennes; on the south, none until within a few miles of Coshocton.
WOOSTER INCORPORATED.
Six years after Wooster was platted and made the county seat, it began
to put on "city airs" and was incorporated, October 13, 1817, and char-
tered as a city of the second class and divided into four wards February
9, 1869, having been made a second-class city in September, 1868. The
at the house of Joseph McGugen for the purpose of electing a president, re-
first election after the incorporation as a town, in March, 1818. was held
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corder and five trustees for the incorporation. Isaiah Jones was elected presi-
dent, John Patton, recorder, T. G. Jones. Thomas Taylor, Joseph Eichar,
Thomas Robison and Benjamin Jones, trustees. These officers were duly
sworn into office on March 12, 1818, agreeing under oath to support the
Constitution of the United States and that of the state of Ohio. At their
first regular business meeting, in the same month and year, they proceeded
to appoint a marshal, treasurer and collector, when David Hoyt was elected
marshal, Thomas R. Knight, treasurer, and Henry St. John, collector.
April 3, 1818, the board met, and on motion it was resolved to appoint
a committee of two to prepare and bring in a bill for the prevention of
immoral practices. At the next meeting a bill for the abatement of nuisances,
introduced by John Patton, with some amendments, became a law, and as
such is the first on record in Wooster.
ELECTION OF MARCH 29, 1 824.
The following is the record of the election held for incorporation officers
at the above date:
“President, Samuel Quimby, Edward Avery, Thomas Robinson, candi-
dates. Recorder, Cyrus Spink, John Patton, William Larwill, candidates.
Trustees, Edward Jones, David McConahay, Francis H. Foltz, Matthew
Johnston, William McFall, Joseph H. Larwill, John Christmas. John Patton,
William McComb, Moses Culbertson. Cyrus Spink, Charles Hobert. David
Robison, Thomas Robison, Thomas Townsend, Horace Howard, William
Nailer, Samuel H. Hand, Edward Avery, Benjamin Jones, Col. John Hem-
perly, all candidates.
“We do hereby certify that Samuel Quimby had fifty-three votes for
president, and William Larwill had thirty votes for recorder, and Edward
Avery had fifty-two votes for trustee, Thomas Robison had thirty-seven votes
for trustee, William McCombs had thirty votes for trustee, William Nailer
had twenty votes for trustee, and Thomas Townsend and John Patton had
each nineteen votes for trustee.
(Signed) “Matthew Johnston,
“William McFall,
“Attest: John Larwill. Clerk of Election. Judges.”
entries in board’s journal.
Ordered, That Joseph Alexander be allowed twenty-five dollars for serv-
ices rendered by digging up stumps in the public square, in July, 1816.
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Ordered, That Cyrus Spink be allowed two dollars for attending on
David Wolgamot, a state’s prisoner, as guard, in July, 1816.
Ordered, That Joseph H. Larwill be allowed the sum of five dollars and
twenty cents for digging a drain to the court house, October, 1817.
Ordered, That Thomas Robison be allowed twelve dollars and fifty
cents for making six poll boxes for the use of the county, 1817.
Ordered, That Joseph Alexander be allowed two dollars for waiting on
grand jury, at October term, 1816.
Ordered, That Benjamin Franks be allowed two dollars for blazing a
road from Paintville in a north direction.
Ordered, That Nathan Warner be allowed to spend two hundred dollars
of the three per cent, fund allotted to this county, on the state road west of
Wooster, for which he shall receive eight dollars.
Ordered, That Benjamin Thompson and Ezekiel Kelly, trustees of the
Baptist church of Wooster, be allowed fifty dollars for use of same, to
hold court and transact other public business in, for the term of two years,
ending June, 1831.
Ordered, That David Wooley, deputy assessor, be allowed twenty-four
dollars and seventy-five cents for assessing the townships of Sugarcreek,
Baughman and Chippewa, June, 1830.
A contract will be sold at the auditor’s office, November 17, 1830, to
the lowest bidder, for the safe keeping and providing for of an idiot called
“Crazy Sam.”
TOWN PRESIDENTS.
1818 — Isaiah Jones
1820 — William Nailer
1822 — Samuel Quimby
1825 — Thomas Wilson
1826 — John Smith
1827 — Thomas Wilson
1828 — J. M. Cooper
1829 — Benjamin Jones
1831 — Thomas Wilson
1 832 — Thomas Wilson
1833 — Matthew Johnston
1834 — Mr. McConnahay
1835 — John Larwill
1836 — Lindol Sprague
1837 — Lindol Sprague
1838 — H. Lehman
1839 — J. W. Shuckles
1840 — John H. Harris
1841 — E. Eyster
1842 — Kimball Porter
1843 — Christian Eyster
1844 — Charles E. Graeter
1845 — Henry Lehman
1846 — Evans Parker
1847 — Thomas Wilson
1848 — Samuel L. Lorah
1849 — Everett Howard
1850 — A. McDonald
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1851 — Christian Eyster
1852 — Jacob Vanhouton
1853 — S. R. Bonewitz
1854 — S. R. Bonewitz
1855 — William Childs
1856 — I. N. Jones
1857 — Neal McCoy
1858 — Neal McCoy
1859 — A. Seybolt
MAYORS OF
1869 — Charles S. Frost
1871 — Charles C. Plumer
1873 — James Henry
1875 — Owen A. Wilhelm
1877 — H. B. Swartz
1879 — H. B. Swartz
1881 — Dennis W. Kimber
1883 — Dennis W. Kimber
1885 — Lemuel Jeffries
1887 — James R. Woodworth
1889 — James R. Woodworth
i860 — J. H. Kauke
!86i— J. H. Kauke
1862 — George Rex
1863 — R. R. Donnelly
1864 — J. H. Downing
1865 — G. W. Henshaw
1866 — James Curry
1867 — A. Wright
1868— R. B. Spink
WOOSTER.
1891 — James R. Woodworth
1893 — Lemuel Jeffries
1895 — Lemuel Jeffries
1897 — Lemuel Jeffries
1899 — Robert J. Smith
1901 — Robert J. Smith
I9°3 — Robert J. Smith
1905 — W. M. VanNest
1907 — W. M. VanNest
!909 — W. M. VanNest
PRESENT CITY OFFICERS.
The city officials for 1908-09 are as follows: Mayor, W. M. VanNest;
solicitor, Benton G. Hay ; auditor, James B. Minier; treasurer, Crosley M.
Tawney; board of public safety, William A. Lott, Emett Lee, N. F. Rob-
erts, Henry Leiner, Charles F. Kingsley.
City Council — Charles A. Weiser, president; Harley H. Franks, clerk;
members-at-large. Max Bloomberg, Charles Lautenschlager, Charles F.
Schopf; first ward, John M. Russell; second ward, Wellington Matz; third
ward, P. U. Rice; fourth ward, Samuel Kready.
Health officer, Dr. J. W. Lehr ; tax commissioners, George J. Schwartz,
John McSweeney, Alvin Rich, W. D. Tyler, James B. Minier. Library
trustees, James Mullins, A. D. Metz, James A. Shamp, Rev. Frank Heil-
man, D. L. Thompson, John N. McSweeney.
In 1905. under a new state law, cities of the class of Wooster were
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put under a new “municipal accounting system,” and the office of city
auditor created. It is one of the most important offices in the municipality,
involving as it does a large amount of especially particular accounting for
the various funds of the city. Prior to this modern system, the bonds,
refunding bonds, and many accounts were lumped together and were hard
to understand or get information from, but with the new way all is clear
and understandable. However, it requires more than an ordinary account-
ant or bookkeeper to form and run the various series of blanks and different
books required in conformity to the new state law. James B. Minier was
the first city auditor of this class, and has made an enviable and state-wide
reputation as an expert in his office.
THE FIRE DEPARTMENT.
The first fire company organized in the city of Wooster was, according
to the minute-book of the company, organized between 1825 and 1827.
One entry reads that: “At a meeting of the Wooster Fire Company No. 1.
convened at the house of William Nailer, Esq., on Saturday, the 20th of
January, 1827, Capt. John Smith called the company to order and Samuel
Quinby was appointed secretary.
“On motion it was resolved, that said company appoint two persons to
act as engineers: six persons to act as ladder-men; two persons to act as
ax-men and two as pike-men for said company.
“Thereupon, William Goodin and D. O. Hoyt were elected engineers;
Samuel Barkdull, David Lozier, James Nailer, John McKracken, Calvin
Hobert and Benjamin Jones were appointed ladder-men ; William H. Sloane
and C. H. Streby were appointed ax-men, and I. E. Harriott and ,
pike-men.”
By-laws were drafted in 1827 anc^ approved at the monthly meeting for
January of that year.
From that small beginning away back in 1827 has come the efficient
department of the twentieth century. The present department, under city
control, has a paid chief and two drivers, but the twenty men who respond
to the fire alarm are men-about-town, who work at other employment days
and sleep in the City Hall in rooms prepared for them especially, and for
their services they get forty cents per hour when at fires. The engine house
is within the municipal building, occupying two floors for the men and appa-
ratus. A Gamewell system of alarms is in operation here. The apparatus
includes a light hose wagon and modem ladders, with a chemical engine
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for certain places, and also there is in readiness a fire engine, but ordinary
fires are extinguished by the direct pressure of the pumping station at the
city water works.
WOOSTER OPERA HOUSES.
The first public hall of much consequence in Wooster was known as
Arcadome Hall, that was built so as to be dedicated December 18, 1857.
Its proprietors were Jo H. Baumgardner and Samuel Woods. The name
Arcadome was coined in the poetical fancy of E. G. Clingan. It stood
on East Liberty street near the present postoffice, and was destroyed by
fire March 23, 1874. Another hall or opera house in the city was Quinby
Opera House, located on the corner of Buckeye and Larwill streets. It
was formally opened February 1, 1877, at which time “As You Like It”
was presented to an overflowing house. This building was the enterprise
of the Quinbv Opera House Association, composed of Messrs. E. Quinby,
Jr., president; E. P. Bates, secretary; J. H. Kauke, D. Q. Liggett, Ira H.
Bates and D. C. Curry. Its dimensions were seventy by one hundred and
four feet; the auditorium was sixty by seventy feet, encircled on three sides
by roomy balconies, the whole having a capacity of one thousand persons.
It was named in honor of Mr. Quinby against his protest. This served
many years and was finally razed to the ground and the lot used for other
purposes. The next provision for an opera house was in 1887 when the
city of Wooster planned the erection of its magnificent brick city building,
when a portion of it was built for opera hall purposes, and is still the
pride and comfort of the theater-loving people. It is modern and has all
the conveniences of a well-regulated theater. It is in all appointments a mod-
ern hall and has the latest fire-proof appliances, exits, screens, etc. It is
managed by a local man and leased to him by the city, on the per cent. plan.
This building was built in 1887 and is spoken of under head of City
Buildings.
What is known as the Academy of Music, on West Liberty street, was
erected originally in 1870 by John B. France, on the lot where stood the
first banking institution of Wooster, the old German Bank. This was a
profitable enterprise and in 1883 was raised one story higher, making a
very large stage room and increasing the seating capacity. This is per-
haps the largest hall in Wooster today. All of these opera houses have
from time to time been the merry scene of gay theatrical troupes.
(27)
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THE CITY HALL.
The present City Building was erected in 1887 and is a massive, beau-
tiful building. It has office rooms for the various city offices, in front, on
the first floor; an engine house and upper story rooms for the use of the
department, and the central portion of the first floor is an excellent opera
house, which has all modern conveniences. This is leased out to local men
of the city, who have charge of it. The building is an ideal, imposing struc-
ture, on East Liberty street, and great care is taken to make its front very
attractive by the cultivation of rare and common flowers and plants, with
vines covering almost the entire front in summertime. The cost of this
municipal building was ninety thousand dollars, including ground and all
furnishings.
PAVING, SIDEWALKS, AND SEWERS.
The city is well supplied with sidewalks, having, in 1909, twenty-three
miles, the same being constructed of either cement, flag-stones or hard brick.
Of sewerage, the city boasts at present of ten miles, while in paved
(brick) streets it has an even six miles.
CITY WATER WORKS.
The following was written by Ben Douglas, in his 1878 county history,
concerning the water-works system :
The first water works established in Wooster were constructed under
a contract negotiated between the original proprietors of the town and the
county commissioners, bearing date May 13, 1811. The conditions of the
contract were that the county seat should be permanently located at Woos-
ter, and among other specifications, it was agreed that the proprietors were
to bring “water of the run, which at present runs through the town, in
pipes of sound white oak timber of a proper size, well bored and laid, and
raise the water ten feet above the surface of the center of the town.”
The contract was complied with by the proprietors, and water was
delivered to the town of Wooster, conducted through pipes, from 1815 to
1829. When the authorities of the town undertook to repair the pipes
conveying the water one of the lot owners through whose premises the
pipes were laid, prohibited them from so doing by an injunction of the
court, and from that time no further attention or effort was made to sustain
the enterprise.
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Subsequently the subject of supplying the city with water from springs
of Mr. Reddick to the north of the city became a matter of grave con-
sideration. May 14, 1874, G. Gow and John Brinkerhoff, civil engineers,
gauged the stream and found it sufficient to protect the city against fire.
The work being inaugurated, the reservoir was constructed under the super-
vision of Mr. Gow, during the summer of 1875, by throwing a dam across
the ravine immediately below the springs, thus raising the water to the
depth of eighteen feet. No further labor was performed until the spring
of 1876, when the works were commenced and conducted through the sum-
mer of 1876, under the immediate supervision of John Brinkerhoff, civil
engineer.
In the construction of the system the pipes used amounted to 3,980
feet of twelve-inch piping, 4,988 feet of ten-inch pipe, 6,432 feet of eight-
inch pipe, 20,023 feet of six-inch pipe and 4,404 feet of four-inch pipe, in all
46,277 feet, or over eight miles.
The total cost of pipe and special castings was $36,390, the entire cost
of the works being $76,256, and with later additions made it amount to
$86,000. The surface of the water at the reservoirs is 128 feet above the
public square. The water from eighty-eight fire plugs located on the line of
the streets can be projected to various heights, ranging from forty to one
hundred feet above the surface, by force of gravity alone. Gravity being
the agent iri the propulsion of the water, the expense of running it to the
works was merely nominal. The supply of water is sufficient for all wants
of the present city, and under improvements introduced by M. M. Smith,
superintendent, during the summer of 1877, the water delivered in the
city was as pure as spring water.
This system, with its additions and changes, served until, in 1907, the
Applecreek pumping station was placed in operation, to the east of the
city. Here two model gas engines pump the water from Applecreek. A
brick pumping station is maintained there; the entire bonded indebtedness
for this improvement to the water-works was nine thousand dollars. This
supplies a great abundance of water for all fire and city street purposes, but
is not of good enough quality to be used by the people for cooking purposes.
The city is at this date (summer of 1909) making an experimental well
north of town, with the view of obtaining a good supply of pure water,
which the city badly needs.
WOOSTER GAS LIGHT COMPANY.
June 18, 1856, the village of Wooster passed an ordinance: ‘To pro-
vide for gas in the incorporated village of Wooster,” by which it provided
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that William Stephenson, of the city of Cleveland, and his associates, should
use the streets, lanes, alleys and other public grounds of said village for
the purpose of laying down and maintaining of their pipes for the con-
veyance of gas in and through the same for the use of the village and the
inhabitants thereof. The ordinance granted the right for a period of ten
years, and restricted the company to three dollars per thousand cubic feet
for gas to citizens, and two dollars for city, except lamp posts, three dollars,
whilst the company owns the posts and lights and extinguishes them.
June 20, 1856, J. H. Kauke, J. H. Baumgardner, Isaac N. Jones, D.
Robison, Jr., H. R. Harrison, John P. Jeffries and C. C. Parsons, Sr., duly
incorporated, under the laws of Ohio the Wooster Gas Light Company, with
a perpetual charter, and said company was duly organized January 14,
1857, by electing J. H. Kauke, Daniel Black, J. H. Baumgardner, I. N.
Jones and J. P. Winebrenner directors, and by-laws were enacted for its
government. The capital stock was twenty thousand dollars, divided into
eight hundred shares of twenty-five dollars each. The gas works were
erected in 1856 and 1857, and the village of Wooster was lighted with
artificial gas in February, 1857, there being then one hundred and five
consumers and twenty street lamps. In 1859 the capital stock was in-
creased to twenty-three thousand seven hundred dollars. The demand for
gas was so great that in 1864 the company pulled down the old arches or
ovens and erected larger ones, and greatly increased the gas-producing ca-
pacity of the plant.
In 1867 the company extended the pipes and increased the capital to
thirty thousand dollars. In 1871 the old works becoming entirely too small
to supply the demand, the directors resolved to erect a new plant. They
purchased the old oil well on East Henry street, from the heirs of William
Henry, and four lots adjoining from E. Quinbv, Jr., giving them a frontage
on Henry street of three hundred and ten feet, on which they erected new
gas works with all modern improvements then known and of sufficient
capacity to supply a city of fifteen thousand population.
This gas company thrived well until about the date that natural gas
was first introduced in Wooster in 1905, when it was soon abandoned.
ELECTRIC LIGHT PLANT.
The first ordinance looking toward the establishment of electric lights
in the city of Wooster was dated March 5, 1886, and was granted to the
Schuyler Electric Lighting Company of New York city. Tt has alwavs
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been conducted by private corporations and in later days was reorganized,
and recently a central heating (hot water) plant was connected therewith.
The stock is largely held abroad. The heating plant will furnish heat to
residences and public buildings at the lowest possible cost to consumers,
and guarantees to give any desired temperature in rooms, by use of an
automatic device. The cost is little or no more than the ordinary methods
of heating houses.
The city has the advantage of using either artificial gas, electricity,
natural gas (which was first piped to the city from Knox county in 1905),
or the less expensive methods employed by using gasoline or kerosene oil.
WOOSTER POSTOFFICE.
The first postoffice established in the county of Wayne was at the point
where Wooster now stands. The date was December 8, 1812, when Thomas
G. Jones was appointed postmaster. Just where the office was kept is not
certain, but likely at the log residence of the postmaster, who was also the
first Baptist minister and conducted a small general store. Following him
came: John Patton, commissioned November 20, 1818; Ezra Dean, April
14, 1829; Bezaleel L. Crawford, March 26, 1841; Jacob M. Cooper, July
22, 1845; Thomas T. Eckert, April 26, 1849; George W. Allison, November
24, 1852; Jacob A. Marchand, November 17, 1853 ; reappointed April 2, 1856;
James Johnson, January 10, i860; Enos Foreman, April 17, 1861; re-ap-
pointed March 17, 1865; Reason B. Spink, November 13, 1866; Addison S.
McClure, April 19, 1867: re-appointed March 28, 1871, and also March 10,
1875 ’> P« C. Given was next postmaster and served until L. P. Oblinger was
appointed and he in turn was succeeded by the following postmasters : Sam-
uel Metzler, John F. Marchand, T. L. Flattery and the present postmaster,
W. B. Bryson.
The postoffice took its present quarters in 1892, having been moved from
the Frick Memorial building on West Liberty street.
The first rural free delivery route was started out from this city April i,
1899, and it has been increased in number to eleven routes with a total mileage
of two hundred and sixty-six miles. Wooster first had free delivery carriers
in the city July 1, 1887, and at this time has six city carriers. The number
of mails received daily by mail trains is twelve.
WOOSTER BOARD OF TRADE.
There have been various organizations for the development and further
commercial and industrial improvement of the city of Wooster, but that
which took on the most important and tangible form was the Board of Trade,
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organized August 3, 1900, and which was duly incorporated under the laws
of the state of Ohio December 14, 1908. This organization has been instru-
mental in obtaining several additions to the city’s industries and is still
energetic in working for more. It now enjoys a membership of almost three
hundred representative citizens. Its 1909 officers are: President, Walter
D. Foss; first vice-president, John C. Schultz; second vice-president, M. M.
Van Nest; secretary, Albert Dix; treasurer, Chas. M. Gray; directors: Nick
Amster, Win. Annat, \V. R. Barnhart, \V. G. Christy, Albert Dix, Walter
D. Foss, H. Freedlander, G. Gerstenslager, Chas. M. Gray, E. S. Landes, J.
C. Schultz, Geo. J. Schwartz, E. W. Thompson, M. M. Van Nest, John M.
Criley.
It has committees appointed to look after the following matters: Pub-
lic improvements, railroads and transportation, new enterprises and indus-
tries, finance and location of office, local mercantile interests, real estate and
insurance, statistics and advertising, legislation, produce and grain, manu-
factures, membership, lumber and coal, taxation, streets and pavements.
WOOSTER PUBLIC LIBRARY.
The early-day library was a small affair and was carried on by the
efforts of a few of the more thoughtful and educated citizens who saw the
need of such a place in the city. Soon after the beginning of this decade the
matter of further increasing Wooster’s library facilities was advocated, and
as a result the old library association was re-organized as a city institution in
fact, and a new' board of officers elected. In 1905 the present beautiful brick
library, on the corner of Ouinby and Bowman streets, was completed and
first occupied. It cost, grounds and building, thirty thousand dollars, of
which amount the philanthropist, Andrew' Carnegie, donated fifteen thousand,
with the provision that the city of Wooster w'as to annually raise the sum of
one thousand five hundred to be used for maintenance of the same. It is a
modern structure, having two stories, the upper one being used for museum
purposes, and in which they are now already many rare specimens and articles
of interest. The library also has in connection with it a fine reading room de-
partment. The present year’s report shows the number of volumes in the
library to be five thousand, to which are being made frequent additions. The
board of trustees is: James Mullins, president; A. D. Metz, vice-president
and treasurer; James Schamp, secretary ; Frank W. Miller. John McSweeney,
D. L. Thompson, Rev. Frank Heilman.
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OLD MARKET-HOUSE DESTROYED BY A MOB.
The first market-house Wooster had, and the last as well, was built in
1833 on the southwest side of the public square, under direction of the town
council, of which Thomas Wilson was the president and J. H. Harris, re-
corder. The building was about forty by seventy-five feet in dimension, one
story high, paved with brick, with ceilings arched and plastered. It was
supported by fourteen columns of brick- wrork about two feet square, twelve
feet high, firmly set on stone corners, eight to ten feet apart, between which
the stalls were situated and each numbered.
It was not many years before the men doing business near the square
declared this market a nuisance that ought to be abated ; but the town author-
ities refused to remove it. As a result it narrowly escaped “purification as by
fire” at the hands of an incendiary. Finally, on August 9, 1847, a number
of men, disguised beyond recognition, went at night time and, assembling
about the building, armed wTith axes, hooks, ropes and tackle, and a horse
strong in pulling qualities, they pulled dowm the offensive building, which at
daylight lay a heap of smouldering embers. The destroyers were termed a
“mob” and excitement ran high for a time. The mayor offered a reward for
the detection of the vandals who had profaned the “temple of mutton and
soup bones,” but without resulting in anybody being arrested; yet many of
the “culprits” wrere well known, but praised for their public improvement
spirit. Perhaps some are still honored residents of Wooster — at least a num-
ber were living a fewr years since. This was the first and last market-house
Wooster has ever had.
OAK HILL CEMETERY.
The care which the living exercise over the “silent cities” — the church-
yards and cemeteries — is always an index of the refinement and Christian
grace and sentiment of any given community. Prior to 1852 the dead of
Wooster were buried in churchyards of the various denominations; also many
from the near-by communities, and there today many of the first fathers and
mothers of Wooster “sleep and heed it not.”
July 12, 1852, a number of Wooster’s citizens, prominent among wrhom
were Levi Cox, John Larwill, Cyrus Spink, E. Quinby. Jr., Constant Lake.
R. B. Stibbs, K. Porter, James Johnson, Harvey Howard and others, agreed
to form themselves into a cemetery association, to be known by the name of
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the Wooster Cemetery Association, and for that purpose signed and published
.a notice. In pursuance to the publication of the notice, and at the time
named therein, a majority of the association met at the court house and
there resolved to elect, by ballot from their number five persons to serve as
trustees and one as clerk of the association. The trustees chosen were Henry
Lehman, James Johnson, Constant Lake, R. B. Stibbs and E. Quinby, Jr.
The original grounds consisted of thirty-two acres and a fractional part
of an acre, purchased of Joseph H. Larwill, the price to be paid being one
hundred dollars per acre. Five promissory notes were executed and the fol-
lowing persons agreed to assume their respective proportions of the notes the
same as if they had been the original signers to them: Samuel Woods. John
H. Harris, J. M. Robison, E. Avery, J. A. Anderson, E. Quinby, Jr., John
McSweeney, Samuel L. Lorah, Thomas Stibbs, William Spear, William
Henry, John P. Jeffries, J. N. Jones, J. S. Spink, J. H. Kaube, William
Belnap, Benjamin Eason, Enos Foreman, E. Dean.
Superintendents were then appointed and the grounds surveyed and
graded. November 13, 1853, it was ordered that a public sale of lots be
had in the cemetery on the 25th of said month.
From 1852, when the original by-laws were adopted, there was but
little change in the instrument with the passing years, but in 1904 there was
a revision, but only on minor points.
The office of superintendent being in many ways of most importance of
any of the officials, the list is given for the years since organization : Henry
Lehman, 1853-54; Lucas Flattery, for same term; James Jacobs, 1854-63;
Lucas Flattery, 1863-77; Isaac Bechtel, 1877-93; John F. Barrett, 1893 to
April, 1909. The first president of the association was Reasin B. Stibbs,
who served from 1858 to 1875.
When the “old part of the ground” was purchased it was in its primeval
woodland state and glory. Since that time additional purchases have been
made, materially increasing the holdings ; many avenues, drives and allot-
ments have been laid out with artistic skill; buildings have been erected in
conformity to the requirements of the association; public vaults have been
constructed: a complete water system established to provide all parts of the
grounds with a good supply of water; much grading to bring in closer
harmony the various sections of the cemetery, without the least sacrifice of
natural beauty and effect. In all there have been purchased ten different lots
of land, making in all at this date eighty acres, which land has cost on an
average of one hundred and ten dollars and thirty-seven cents per acre.
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In the summer of 1874 a residence for the sexton was built, the original
cost of which was two thousand eight hundred dollars. Later five hundred
dollars was expended on the place. Stables, tool houses and other buildings
have been added. In 1884 a public receiving vault was made at a cost of
three thousand eight hundred and forty-five dollars. In 1895, after mature
consideration, a complete water-works system was planned. A two-thousand-
barrel reservoir was constructed on the eastern side of the premises, and
water pipes radiate therefrom throughout the cemetery. This cost one
thousand five hundred dollars. In 1904 improvements were made, including
the better heating facilities for the main house, near the entrance to the
grounds and the erection of tool houses, etc., at a cost of one thousand
dollars.
Among the many rules and regulations of the association, are these
provisions: This organization is for mutual benefit; the purchaser of a lot
becomes and is a member of the association; the trustees are elected by the
lot owners and receive no compensation; all monies received are expended
on or for the grounds.
From 1853 to r88o there were two thousand and thirty-one burials
within this cemetery. Since 1880 the average number of burials here has
been one hundred and sixteen, making (up to 1904) a total of five thousand
two hundred and fifteen interments.
This beautiful cemetery is near the city to the southeast, and is one of
the charming spots of this section. The landscape work of nature, together
with the embellishments made by the various superintendents, makes this one
of the most beautiful cemeteries in all this portion of northern Ohio.
In the northeast corner of this cemetery is to be seen a bronze fluted
shaft, or column, about twenty-five feet high, surmounted by a life-sized
bronze volunteer infantryman, with knapsack and musket. The monument
is situated on a very conspicuous part of the grounds. Its west face has the
following inscription : ‘‘Presented by James Mullins to Given Post, No.
133, Grand Army of the Republic, of Department of Ohio.” On the eastern
face of the base is this: “To the Heroes of Wayne County — 1895.” On the
south is the badge of the Grand Army of the Republic, while on the north
side is a Union shield. The column is planted as a pedestal on four huge
base stones. By its side is an old cannon, mounted on caisson which saw
service in one of the early wars, and the woodwork at present is rapidly going
to decay.
Within this sacred enclosure — the city cemetery — lie buried more than
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three hundred and forty soldiers of the various American wars, the larger
part of whom are from out the ranks of the Union soldiers of the great Civil
war.
SOLDIERS'' MONUMENT.
On the southwest corner of the public square stands a beautiful granite
monument, with a drinking fountain attached. The whole is within a tasty
iron enclosure, in which are placed two large sized Parrott guns (small cannon)
with a pyramid of cannon-balls. In the center of the ground fenced in is a
sixty-foot metal flag staff, made of tubing and painted white, from which on
appropriate occasions is seen streaming to the breeze, “Old Glory."
On the north side of the base of the monument is this inscription:
“Erected by Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Frick in honor of the Union soldiers of
Wayne county and presented to the City of Wooster, May 5, 1892." Sur-
mounting the monument is a life-sized statue of a United States volunteer
soldier in the uniform of an infantryman.
THE METAL BAND-STAND.
On the west side of the southern portion of the public square is a metal
band-stand of rare beauty and it is surmounted with a flag-staff. The whole
structure is made of iron and steel, even the canopied roof and the posts
which support the main stand. It is octagonal in form and here of evenings,
during the summer months, the Wooster Band discourses music to the edi-
fication of the throngs who there assemble.
THE WOOSTER BRUSH WORKS.
Perhaps the most important factory in the city of Wooster is the brush
factory, established in 1851 by Adam Foss in a small room on the third floor
of the building now occupied by Brandt’s book store on the east side of the
public square. The founder was succeeded by Walter D. Foss, a son of
Adam Foss, and George J. Swartz, in 1876, who carried on the business of
brush-making in the two-story frame building at No. 35 South Market street.
On the night of January 29, 1880, the plant was almost totally destroyed by
the torch of an incendiary, but within a week the business had been re-opened
in a frame building adjoining Wilhelm’s carriage factory, now Clapper’s
block and bag factory. In the summer of t88o it was removed to the three-
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427
story brick building on South Market street, and later an addition was found
necessary. In July, 1904, the partnership of W. D. Foss and G. J. Swartz,
after twenty-eight years’ duration, was mutually dissolved, Mr. Swartz re-
tiring and Walter D. Foss & Sons’ Company continuing as the Wooster
Brush Works. In February, 1907, W. D. Foss purchased the south half of
the three-story building known as the Foss & Lee block, at No. 56 South
Market street, and a portion of their plant was then moved there. In 1909
it was decided to have a whole new and complete factory and accordingly
they now occupy the immense factory at the intersection of Madison avenue
and the Pennsylvania railroad property. The building is seventy by two
hundred feet, with a heating and power plant attached. This building has
three times more floor space than both the old factories had. It is surmounted
by a huge wooden tank holding twenty-five thousand gallons of water, for
use in the factory and as a fire protection. Goods are received and shipped
on a special spur of the railroad. The building was first occupied in August,
l9°9.
Almost every variety of brushes extant are here made. Their trade is
almost world-wide and the quality of goods made is very superior. Scores
of men and women find constant and profitable employment at these works.
This in brief is the history of a business that has been in the hands of one
family for over a half century.
WOOSTER NURSERY COMPANY.
Among the industries of modern days in Wooster is the nursery of the
Wooster Nursery Company, which was incorporated in June, 1906, with a
capital of ten thousand dollars, with the following officers and directors : T.
E. Ewing, president and manager; Calvin Fry, vice-president; Stephen N.
Green, secretary and treasurer. The directors are T. E. Ewing, Carey Eelty,
W. J. Griffin and William King.
It should be stated, however, that this nursery had been established as a
private concern by T. E. Ewing in 1902 and that it had developed into a good
paying business by the date it was incorporated. The land now cultivated and
owned by this company is near the Experimental Station, near Wooster, and
consists of thirty-one acres. Besides this fertile tract, the company also
leases land near the high school building. They carry on. a general nursery
business and sell their trees and numerous plants, both locally and through-
out the entire country, employing agents, and do an extensive mail order
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business. They reach out to many sections of the United States by catalogs.
In the busy season of the year many men find steady employment, besides
many more agents.
In connection with their general nursery business, this company also
operates a large line of greenhouses and a seed and plant house in Wooster
occupying two floors and a basement of a business house near the public
square, one hundred and eighty feet in depth, in which they carry a full line
of bulbs, plants and farm and garden seeds, sold in both wholesale and retail.
This trade is carried to all parts of the globe, including Asia and far-away
countries.
In the spring of 1908 this company purchased the J. B. Notestein nur-
series at Jackson, a concern of more than a quarter of a century growth; also
the following season bought the stock of the E. C. Green & Son nursery of
Medina county, which added greatly to their business.
The benefits of the nearness to the Ohio Experimental Station can
hardly be calculated, as their exhaustive and practical investigations and ex-
periments enable the nursery to arrive at positive conclusions in regard to
varieties best suited to customers.
THE PIONEER MILL OF WAYNE COUNTY.
Around the first and all early mills of almost any county there ever rests
a wonderful amount of true history, tragedy and interesting legend. This
is true indeed with the old Stibbs mills, near the present site of Wooster.
This flouring-mill is now known, as it has been many years, as the Naftzger
or Empire mills. It dates its building from an even century ago, built as it
was in 1809 by Joseph Stibbs, who emigrated from Pennsylvania in 1803
and from Columbiana county, Ohio, in the spring of 1813, having been here
four years before and erected a small flouring-mill and a log cabin.
After his return he took personal charge of the mill and soon it drew custom
from far and near, as it was the only mill within Wayne county and a large
radius around depended upon its mill-stones to grind out breadstuff’s for
many a family. It derives its power from a race, drawing water from Apple-
creek. the length of this mill-race being about a mile. In the history of the
mill there have been three different races dug. The first two were just to
the east of the present race and were not so deep. The present lace is sufficient
to give speed to an eighteen-foot overshot waterwheel. The stage of water
is fairly good most of the year, but at times it is too low, hence steam power
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was applied in connection with the water power a few years ago and now it
is contemplated putting in a gas engine (possibly electric) and using the flow
of natural gas that is now piped to a point a few rods from the mill. The
capacity of this pioneer mill (that long years ago was converted into a roller-
process mill) is forty-eight barrels per day. It is now the property of the
Empire Milling Company, made up of local men, and is managed by Otto
Riffle. It was purchased by J. R. Naftzger in 1866 from D. D. Miller and he
bought the property from Jacob Kramer.
Could this old mill but talk, a wonderful history it might reveal of the
early day toils and journeys made by pioneers from a long distance. It was
here that occurred the powder explosion mentioned elsewhere in this volume,
and in which accident one man was killed, including Indians. A carding-mill
was added to the mill soon after its erection by Stibbs. James Miles, the first
carder, paid six and a quarter cents for packages of wild thorns with which
to pin up the rolls of wool when carded. Still later a woolen factory was
built on the site of the carding mills, by the son, Thomas Stibbs. Still later
a linseed oil mill was put in. This was, indeed, the busiest place for the
whirl of spindle and hum of machinery in all this section.
Mr. Stibbs, the founder, died August 9. 1841, owner of one thousand
two hundred acres of land on Apple creek, mostly in Wayne township. After
his death and with the passing of several years, a distillery was built and
operated at the same site, along the mill-race. The natural successor to this
was the present brewery and artificial ice plant located near the mill property
and which is among the paying plants of this section. At the old mill used to
be carried on an extensive natural ice business. A large pond was made and
the water run from the race was allowed to freeze, thus producing a fine grade
of ice, which was packed in two large ice houses near the pond.
Thus has been kept intact one of Wayne county’s oldest landmarks. The
waters of Apple creek have thus found their way to the far-away ocean and
back through cloud and rivulet to again turn the “old water mill” for more
than a hundred years. Four generations have been supplied with bread from
the bolting chest of this mill, which has kept pace with modern flour-making
improvements and today sends forth an excellent brand of family flour that
finds a ready sale within Wayne county, where it is nearly all consumed.
SNOWFLAKE FLOURING-MILLS.
These flouring-mills. on the corner of Bever and East Liberty streets,
were established as the old-fashioned buhr-stone mills in the fifties. With
the passing of the decades, and the improvement in the manufacture of flour.
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the machinery was gradually changed to meet the requirements of the times
and in 1879 they were the property of Plank Brothers, who continued until
it became known as Plank & Gray's mills. In April, 1909, it changed to
Gray & Smith, the present owners, Charles M. Gray and A. G. Smith. These
modern process-roller mills have a daily capacity of one hundred and thirty-
five barrels, which is all sold within one hundred miles of Wooster. The
sales of “Snowflake” run about six thousand fifty-pound sacks per week. The
steam power was superseded in 1907 by natural gas engines as a propelling
power. These mills have the best local trade of any mills in northern Ohio.
OTHER INDUSTRIES.
The printing art and industry is well represented at Wooster. The two
daily newspapers both do an excellent job printing business, besides the Col-
lier Printing Company, on Bever and Xorth streets, and the George A. Clapper
printing establishment, on East Liberty street. The latter was founded
in 1879 as a straight printery, but in about 1898 added another department,
that of manufacturing and printing salt pockets or bags, the whole of which
monthly output is sold in advance to the Wadsworth Salt Company, of Wads-
worth, Ohio. This has come to be a very extensive business.
Wooster Artificial Ice and Brewing Company; Wooster Brick and Shale
Works ; the Gerstenslager Carriage and W agon Company ; Dishwasher fac-
tory; Wooster Preserving Company; overall factory and numerous other
lesser industries are all found doing an extensive business in their special lines
at this date.
From the first settlement of Wooster, the chief industries up to about
1840 were the numerous tanneries and distilleries located in and near to the
town. Liquor then had no internal revenue upon it and was sold at low fig-
ures— as low as seventeen cents per gallon. Tanning skins and hides was
almost indispensable, for leather had to be made, as transportation was high
and markets far away. These tanneries have long since gone out of business
and leather is made under the “trust” system largely, in the great leather
centers of the country, as well as the shoes and harness made from it.
“widow blockhouse” gets married.
Among the stories handed down from “ancient days” in W'ooster is
this: At the north end of town stood the old block house, in which at the
time narrated about there lived an old lady the men had nicknamed “Widow
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Blockhouse.” Suddenly she surprised the community by announcing that
she had concluded to doff her mourning and take to herself another hus-
band in the person of an old fellow who had neither money nor home. This
was “fun for the boys” of that period, and they made Widow Blockhouse's
marriage an extra occasion, which event must here pass into the history
of Wooster and Wayne county. All the jovial spirits of the settlement
were present on the evening of the wedding. It was a lively occasion.
Squire McClarran, an inveterate joker, performed the ceremony with the
greatest solemnity. In the beginning, after a few remarks on matrimony
in general and this case in particular, he asked if there was any one present
who had objections to this lovely couple “renewing their hearts” in mar-
riage, whereupon a gentleman impressively arose and in a most compli-
mentary manner withdrew all of his claims upon the affections of the bride.
Then another arose, and another, until all had made remarks and given his
consent to the marriage, it being very evident from their words that they
all felt they had a sort of personal claim upon the affianced charming ( ?)
widow, but felt forced to give way to a more favored suitor. The ceremony
concluded, the Squire ordered every man in the room to kiss the bride. This
was complied with by all until it came to the last man, who resided in
Wooster many long years after that laughable event, and who emphatically
refused, saying, “I will be d d if that is not asking too much!”
BIOGRAPHIES OF WOOSTER S FOUNDERS.
The attention of the reader of this volume is respectfully called to the
two biographical sketches of the founders of Wooster, John Bever and
William Henry, which occur in the biographical part of this work. That of
Mr. Larwill is not in the possession of the historian, as he failed to supply
the proper material in his lifetime.
BANKS OF WOOSTER.
With the settlement of every new country, the matter of banks has
always been of much importance to the citizens. While they at first had
but little money to deposit, if indeed any, yet at times the bank was a neces-
sary adjunct to the settlement and development of the country. Here in
Wayne county at first all kinds of commodities went current for money.
Barter was the currency of the times — pelts, skins, furs, grain, produce, and
even whisky was as good to the settler who chanced to possess it as money
is today.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
The first banking house of the county was established in 1816 and
known as the German Bank of Wooster. T. J. Jones was its president and
W. Larwill cashier. For a time it operated without a charter and its ex-
istence was of short duration.
In 1834 the Bank of Wooster was established, 'with J. S. Lake as presi-
dent and Benjamin Bentley as cashier. This bank suspended in the month
of March, 1848.
The Wayne County Branch of the State Bank of Ohio was organized
in February, 1848. D. Robison, Sr., was president until January, 1858, and
Isaac Steese from 1858 until the expiration of its charter in 1865, F.
Ouinby, Jr., being cashier from its organization until its close in 1865.
The Wayne County National Bank was organized in January, 1865,
with R. R. Donnelly, president, and E. Quinby, Jr., cashier. In January,
1874, Harrison Armstrong was made president and held the position until
his death, in 1876: E. Quinby, Jr., serving as cashier. The original cap-
ital was seventy-five thousand dollars, with the option of enlarging to two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. At present this banking house is among
the solid institutions of Wayne county and operates under a capital of one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It occupies a massive brick bank build-
ing on the west side of the public square, the same having been erected in
1905. The present officers of this bank are: J. S. R. Overholt, president;
Frank Taggart, vice-president; John M. Criley, cashier. Its deposits are
four hundred thousand dollars. The new bank building stands on the old
site of the bank as originally organized in 1848, and includes twenty feet
front, purchased when the new structure was built, making the banking
rooms spacious and up-to-date in every particular.
The Exchange Bank began business in April, 1854, under the style of
Sturges, Stibbs & Company, as a private banking house, and in 1863 it was
changed to Stibbs. Hanna & Company. I^ater it was changed to J. H.
Kauke & C. S. Frost. This bank is not now in business.
The National Bank of Wooster was brought into existence as follows:
The private banking company of Bonewitz, Emrich & Company was organ-
ized in the spring of 1865, by S. R. Bonewitz, T. S. Johnson, M. W. Pink-
erton, G. P. Emrich, John Bechtel and C. H. Brown, with a cash capital of
twenty-five thousand dollars. In April, 1865, it opened its doors for banking
business and operated successfully until 1868. when it was reorganized as the
Commercial Bank of W'ooster. with a capital of seventy-five thousand dollars.
Its officers then were: President, T. S. Johnson: cashier, S. R. Bonewitz:
teller. C. V. Hard: directors, T. S. Johnson. S. R. Bonewitz. G. P. Emrich.
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D. Robison, Jr., M. W. Pinkerton. Mr. Johnson resigned April io, 1868,
and Mr. Emrich was chosen, and continued president until the bank ceased
to exist. July 22, 1869, Mr. Bonewitz, cashier, resigned and C. V. Hard
was appointed assistant cashier, retaining such position during the life of
the institution. In November, 1871, the shareholders of the Commercial
Bank were granted a charter for the National Bank of Wooster with a
capital of one hundred thousand dollars. November 29th the books were
opened for subscriptions, and the same day the amount of capital stock was
taken. G. P. Emrich, D. Robison, Jr., M. Welker, J. Zimmerman, G. B.
Smith, J. S. Hollowed and W. Barton were chosen directors, to serve until
January 2, 1872, the day the bank began business. The officers were: Presi-
dent, David Robison, Jr.; vice-president, G. P. Emrich; cashier, C. V. Hard;
teller, Will Emrich, a position vacated in 1876 by T. E. Peckinpaugh, to
become one of the proprietors of the Wayne County Democrat.
In the panicky days of finance in 1904, and because of suspicious actions
on the part of some of the bank’s officials, the government sent an inspector
on from Washington, examined the accounts, appointed a receiver and finally
closed up this banking house permanently. The president and cashier, who
were also interested in a large drug store in Wooster, and which had much
to do with the closing of the bank, were finally tried and sentenced to sev-
eral years in the penitentiary of Ohio. One is still in that institution. The
stockholders made good the loss of money to the depositors, which act
ruined some of the stockholders financially. Had the bank inspector waited
a reasonable length of time, it is believed that the matter might have been
adjusted and the bank’s doors not closed for all time. But the majesty
of the law must be upheld, and some one had to lie the loser. The bank
was closed for business November 23, 1904.
AN EARLIER BANK FAILURE.
“September 2, 1868/’ says Ben Douglas in his 1878 history of Wayne
county, “T. S. Johnson started a bank, too, which the same was of discount
and deposit, with a capital of twenty thousand dollars, and in 1875 it ,
when there was wailing among the depositors to the amount of one hun-
dred thousand dollars.”
BUILDING AND LOAN COMPANIES.
Besides these regular banking houses, Wooster today has the benefit of
the following building and loan institutions, all doing an excellent business.
The Wayne Building and Loan Companv, C. E. Thorne, president: J. (i.
(28)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Sanborn, cashier. It has assets amounting to six hundred and eighty thou-
sand, three hundred and forty-three dollars. It was organized July i, 1909.
Wooster Building and Loan Company, incorporated in 1892; the assets
are four hundred and forty-two thousand, seven hundred and forty-six
dollars; president, Charles M. Gray; J. W. Hooke, secretary.
The Home Building and Loan Company was incorporated September
1, *905* with an authorized capital of one hundred thousand dollars; officers,
David W. Musselman, president; William M. Linn, vice-president; Weston
T. Peckinpaugh, secretary and treasurer. The assets, on June 30, 1908,
were one hundred and thirty-three thousand, nine hundred and forty-seven
dollars.
PRESENT BANKS OF WOOSTER.
In the year 1909 the banking concerns of the city of Wooster were as
follows :
Wayne County National Bank, following the old Wooster branch of
the State Bank of Ohio. It has a capital of one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars, with deposits of four hundred thousand dollars. This bank has
been mentioned at length heretofore.
The Citizens’ National Bank, organized in 1905, has one hundred thou-
sand dollars capital and its officers are as follows: L. E. Yocum, president;
Charles M. Gray, vice-president; E. M. Thompson, cashier. Cash capital,
one hundred thousand dollars; deposits, six hundred and forty thousand
dollars.
Commercial Bank, organized in 1896. Present officers, Albert Shupe.
president; W. R. Barnhart, vice-president; E. P. Shupe, cashier; cash capital,
fifty thousand dollars.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF WOOSTER.
The first school house was a brick building erected where afterward
stood the third ward building. The first school was taught by a young sprig
of a lawyer, Carlos Mather, from New Haven, Connecticut, in 1814. I11
1 853 and 1854 each of the wards of the city built a school house of its own,
and for a few years thereafter each had a school independent of the others.
Then they were finally put under one management, with John BrinkerhofT
as their general superintendent, a position he held until 1870.
By 1867 the school accommodations became insufficient and voluntarily
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the citizens taxed themselves to erect the best school house in northern
Ohio. This was completed in 1870 and, with its grounds and furnishings,
cost one hundred and thirteen thousand dollars. This is a part of the present
high school building, to which, in 1909, was added a large section, all being
complete and modern in its appointments. For many years it has stood out
as the most attractive building in Wooster. Its architectural beauty has
been the comment of thousands of strangers who from year to year have
visited the city. It stands on the northwest corner of Market and Bowman
streets. Within this structure is now held the high school of Wooster. A
library of three hundred volumes, a geological cabinet, chemical apparatus,
etc., were placed in the building as early as 1876. In 1874 vocal music was
introduced into the schools as a regular branch of study in all the grades.
In 1877 drawing was introduced and a special teacher employed for this
study. The superintendent has for many years held monthly meetings of
all his instructors. By state school reports it is learned that in 1877 the
Wooster schools were among the best in Ohio. A large number have al-
ways sought this city from remote parts of the county for the purpose of ob-
taining a higher education than it was possible to gain at home.
The ward school buildings above referred to served well the purpose
for which they were erected until the city had outgrown them. In 1891
what is known as Pittsburg Avenue building was erected, a two-story, two-
room building, still in use. Bealle Avenue building was erected in 1901 at
a cost of twenty-seven thousand dollars. It is a fine modern two-story brick
building, containing six rooms. South Walnut Street building was erected
in 1902, at a cost of thirty-one thousand dollars. It contains eight rooms and is
thoroughly modern in all its appointments. The annex to the high school
building was erected in 1908-09 at a cost of more than forty thousand dol-
lars. It, together with the original building erected in 1868-70, is now
styled Central High School building and is an imposing structure.
The present school board is made up as follows : President, George W.
Ryall; clerk, J. T. Keister, John A. Myers (1909) ; D. L. Thompson, superin-
tendent; C. M. Tawney, treasurer; city school examiners, C. M. Tawney,
James M. Schamp and D. L. Thompson.
J. E. Fitzgerald became superintendent of the city schools in the autumn
of 1909. At that date the number of teachers in the various city schools
was thirty-three. Of this number, ten were employed in the high school.
The total number of pupils enrolled in Wooster schools in 1909 was nineteen
hundred and sixty-six.
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EIGHTH OF JANUARY CELEBRATIONS JACKSONIAN.
Since early in the fifties, Wooster has always had a very interesting
celebration in the way of observing the anniversary of the battle of New
Orleans and the great achievements of Gen. Andrew Jackson and his gallant
army. It has come to be a ‘'fixed institution” in Wooster. It is annually
observed as a grand jubilee day. and to it men of state and national renown
come each year to share in the interesting program. Usually members of
Congress are invited and come and deliver eloquent and historic speeches to
a large assemblage. Banquets are served and the rising young are fired
with the true spirit of patriotism and love of country and a higher respect
is inculcated into them, by the observance, with the return of each January
8th, of this anniversary.
WAYNE COUNTY’S CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION.
On August ii, 12, 13, 14 and 15, 1896, at Wooster occurred the one
hundredth anniversary of the forming of Wavne county by order of the
then governor of the Northwest Territory, Gen. Arthur St. Clair, who
had the honor of establishing original Wayne county, the date of its establish-
ment being August 15, 1796. Indeed it would fill a good sized volume to
detail all there was of interest at that celebration — Wayne county’s centen-
nial. But the following description must suffice in this connection :
On the 1 1 tli day of August, 1896, commenced a series of brilliant exer-
cises, which culminated on the great day of the real anniversary, August
15th. The decorations throughout the city were never half so brilliant and
bewitching. The public square was truly a mass of bunting. The court
house, from tower to base, was literally clothed in rich festoons and flags.
North Market street had an entrance archway with the figures, “1796,”
bold and sightly : over South Market street “1896” appeared conspicuous;
over West Liberty -street, at the court house, hung a beautiful portrait of Gen-
eral Wooster, and over East Liberty street was to be seen that of Gen.
Anthony Wayne. These pictures were executed and presented to the com-
mittee bv M. S. Nachtrieb. In the center of the square there stood a white-
canopied grand stand: just to the north was a real log cabin, built by a pio-
neer of ninety-eight years before. Its interior and exterior were furnished
with primitive furniture of pioneer days, not forgetting the coon .skin at the
door and the draw-well. The decorations by the merchants on the public
square were lavish and gay. The program of the centennial was as follows.
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in brief: Inaugural day, Tuesday, August nth; Educational day, Wednes-
day, August 12th; Soldiers' day, Thursday, August 13th; Church day, Fri-
day, August 14th; Pioneer day, Saturday, August 15th. The last day
surpassed all ; the procession was the longest ever seen within Wayne county,
being two miles long. All the arts and sciences and business industries of
Wooster made it at once a complete, impressive and instructive scene. Mu-
sic and bands from far and near enlivened the day. Ten thousand people
participated in the march. At the southwest corner of the square a speaker's
stand had been provided, and from it many eloquent and witty speeches
were made.
Of educational day it may be stated that the exercises were held at the
opera house and later bicycle races were in order. In the evening, at the
opera house was ‘‘Woman’s Evening," presided over by Mrs. Ben Douglas
and prayer was offered up by Mrs. Kirkwood.
Soldiers’ day was observed at the park. Captain Lybarger first spoke,
and was followed by Hon. John Sherman, who delivered a masterly address
in which he brought out the point plainly that the Indian was rightfully
driven from this fair section in order to make room for a better type of civil-
ization.
Church and Sunday school day found twenty-five thousand people in
Wooster; eight thousand were at the tents at the park at opening time. Later
fifteen thousand were on the grounds. Rev. W. O. Thompson, president
of the Miami University, spoke, as did Rev. George W. Peppard, and Rev.
T. K. Davis spoke at the Lutheran church.
Pioneer day, day of all days, under the charge of the Pioneer Picnic
Association, was a great gathering — a genuine love feast of pioneers and the
younger generations. Judge L. R. Critchfield made a masterly oration,
which was printed in full. It was replete with all that was noble, good and
inspiring, and was a valuable historic contribution, being reprinted elsewhere
in this work.
DAYS OF MOURNING IN WOOSTER.
In April, 1865, upon the death of President Lincoln, Wooster was in
sorrow, in common with all the country. The body of the martyred Presi-
dent was viewed by many from Wooster as the train stopped at Cleveland,
en route to Illinois. The news of his death was received at 11 o’clock the
day of his death and immediately the stores and business houses were
closed, bells tolled mournfully, the people assembled in groups and every
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one seemed surrounded by a deep gloom. The town was filled with people
from outside, and all bore evidence of deep grief. On the following Sabbath
people greeted one another in subdued tones, and tears coursed down many a
strong man's cheeks. The churches all observed the day in sorrow and held
appropriate memorial services, alluding especially to the great Emancipator
in the sermons that were delivered.
DEATHS OF GARFIELD AND M'KINLEY.
In 1881, when President Garfield was stricken down, the people again
put on mourning in Wayne county. Then, at the death of President William
McKinley, the heart strings of all were almost snapped asunder. Regardless
of political lines, all were his friends, and at this time became his mourners
in fact. The city of Wooster was for the third time within twenty-six years
draped in deep mourning for the assassination of a President — all three
noble specimens of American manhood. A committee was appointed from
the Wayne county bar and appropriate resolutions were spread on the rec-
ords, Mr. McKinley having at one time been a member of the bar in this
county. Memorial services were held in the Methodist Episcopal and Luth-
eran churches. President S. F. Scovel, of the University of Wooster, spoke
to a large audience at the Lutheran church on “McKinley as a Statesman.”
“Lead Kindly Light” (the President's favorite hymn) was tenderly sung
at the services. The church was appropriately draped and had a setting of
palms.
At the Methodist Episcopal church flowers and drapings of black and
royal purple adorned the ceilings and walls. Rev. Neikirk read from the
Scriptures and Judge L. R. Critchfield delivered the address on behalf of the
bar of Wayne county. It need not be added that it was a gem of oratory.
Judge Taggart also spoke for the citizens of Wooster. The last address was
by President Holden, of the University of Wooster.
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CHAPTER XXII.
HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WOOSTER.
By Sylvester F. Scovel.
A university is an affair of the generations. That lends a peculiar sacred-
ness to all which concerns its origin and fundamental principles, for by the
generations God creates anew the heavens and the earth in the mental, moral
and spiritual worlds.
Wooster is yet young. This sketch is written in 1910, which is but
sixty-three years from 1847, when the first faint echo of the agitation for a
Presbyterian college reached the synods of Ohio. It is but forty-four years
since the charter was granted in 1866, but forty-two years since the corner-
stone was laid in 1868, and just less than forty years since the main building
was dedicated and actual college-life began within its open doors in Sep-
tember, 1870.
That which makes it easier to relate Wooster’s history is this youthful-
ness. Anything less than a century in the life of a university is but an
annual ring in the age-long growth of a Calaveras pine. The external life
of a brief period can be more easily presented and the internal life more ad-
equately penetrated and depicted. It is also true that Wooster’s development
has followed the lines of its original projection and that three out of its four
decades have been characterized by quiet progress — the startling things being
reserved for the fourth.
On the other hand, within a period so limited and so recent all sorts
of historical material are accessible and rigid “selection” is rendered com-
pulsory, difficult though it be, and this becomes the more imperative in a
work which essays to discover and trace all the lines of interest which legiti-
mately belong to the story of such a county as Wayne. Yet these limits must
not be too rigidly interpreted, seeing that the importance of the university
element in the life of Wayne county is becoming steadily more perceptible
and perceived. The life and meaning, the ideals and realizations of our
central educational institution should be carefully restated from time to time
in ampler and more consecutive form than the transient publications provide
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
for. This has not been done since the admirable contribution by the second
president (Dr. Taylor) to the highly esteemed history of Wayne county,
edited by that remarkable man, Benjamin Douglas. That communication was
written in 1877 (published in 1878) and represents the University's first thir-
teen years. It is, perhaps, appropriate that after the interval of thirty-three
years. Dr. Taylor's successor in office should succeed to his task as historian.
Period I may be called
THE PERIOD OF INCEPTION AND PREPARATION.
We might press the beginning of this period, constructively, clear away to
the atrocities on both sides, which ended in stripping the north of Ireland of
its proper possessors by Cromwell and the insertion there of the elements out
of which time created that peculiarly hardy and intelligent and aggressive
folk popularly known as the “Scotch-Irish." They came to western Penn-
sylvania and thence into central Ohio, and reached the st°te also from Ken-
tucky and -North Carolina. They planted the “Scotch-Irish seeds in American
soil" (see Dr. Craighead's interesting volume with this title). And the har-
vest was not only political freedom but an intellectual intensity that could not
be content without making the speediest possible provision for the education
of their children. The home missionaries of the Presbyterian church were
generally men of education and they never ceased to foster the conviction that
education must follow the attainment of any satisfaction of “existence
wants," because it was emphatically the first of the “culture wants." Other
denominations succeeded in planting colleges under pressure of the two great
motives common to all — the sacredness of education in its moral and religious
aspects, and the provision of a ministry for the edification of the church and
die ultimately world-wide conversion of men. This essentially religious and
only formally denominational pressure, more than any other force, determined
the diffusive college policy which did so much to make the state the new Mother
of Presidents. Its results are manifest, if one stands besides the group of
statues in the Capitol's park, and traces the touch of the denominational col-
leges upon that rare collection of Ohio's “jewels." [The writer had the privi-
lege of defending this policy before the Ohio Society of Xew York on an
occasion in which the then Governor McKinley made the principal address,
and had subsequently the satisfaction of the Governor's approval of the posi-
tion taken.]
The Presbyterians of the state did not at first establish their own insti-
tution. but co-operated with those under state patronage, as in the case of
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Miami University, or in partnership with another denomination, as at Marietta
and with Western Reserve and in lesser degree with Oberlin. All believed in
the just combination of the spiritual with the mental and moral elements in
training and developing the whole man, as necessary to a complete and
symmetrical education. But as other denominations entered the field and as
no one of the arrangements tried seemed thoroughly satisfactory; as many of
the sons of their own families were sent to Eastern institutions; the Presby-
terians continued to discuss the propriety and finally the necessity for an in-
stitution of their own.
We have the most direct and reliable account of this period of genesis
in the various addresses of the Rev. Dr. John Robinson, of which there are
now extant but rare copies, and especially in the ample and careful statements
made at the inauguration of the first president (Dr. Lord). And just here
it must be noted that while Dr. James Hoge (so long pastor at Columbus)
and Dr. John Robinson appear together as joint promoters of this great inter-
est from the beginning, it is to the latter we are indebted for many years of
most valuable service (after the death of the former) both as president of the
board of trustees and as the historian of the first period in the University's
life. He was spared to state and preserve for record the circumstances and
convictions accompanying the conception and birth of the enterprise, to make
plain its meaning and motives, and to impress these in clear and unmistak-
able terms at the inaugurations of the first, second and third presidents. ‘The
idea we realize in part to-day," he said on the first occasion, “arose simul-
taneously a quarter of a century since [i. e., about 1845] m the minds of
earnest members of the synods of Cincinnati and Ohio. It sprang naturally
from the fact that the church had just then entered upon the plan of doing
ecclesiastically, in her organic capacity, her proper work for the evangeliza-
tion of our race. Foreign and domestic missions, ministerial education and
publication she was carrying on under her own supervision. Nor could it be
seen why her efforts in the direction of collegiate education should be less
effective than those of voluntary associations or individuals, or why she
should leave the important work of moulding the ruling minds of successive
generations to other hands. This work seemed fundamental if not to her
existence at least to her prosperity, her success not only in multiplying an
evangelical ministry, but in ramifying every department of society with her
earnest piety and her sturdy theology. To neglect this seemed suicidal.
* * * There seemed no alternative left but to prove derelict to
duty or pursue this course [i. e. to create their own institution]. In this they
heard the voice of God ”
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Then the president of the board emphasized the call to evangelization of
the world, which the church was beginning to hear with a new sense of re-
sponsibility. To secure the laborers for the great white harvest no other
way appeared except “an institution where she could bring her religious in-
fluences to bear in her own way, most intensely, where she could infuse an
intense missionary spirit, give a biblical cast to the whole course of study and
inculcate her very ‘ism; not offensively nor with bigotry, or for mere sec-
tarian ends, but with the energy which a conviction of its divinity gives, and
where she might do all this without being trammeled by the fear of a lack of
candor, or wounding the denominational sensibilities of any, or lessening
patronage/’
In addition to this dominant religious motive there was also the per-
suasion that there did not then exist in Ohio “an institution possessing the
means and facilities for giving that broad and thorough culture which the age
and the exigencies of the church demand. Not, therefore, to add another to
the many colleges of Ohio that burlesque the name, but to establish an institu-
tion with broad foundations and with facilities equal to the best in the land,
capable of preparing men for every department of life, for the highest walks
of science in all its forms, enabling them to wrench from the hands of infidel
sciolists the weapons with which they now attack the Christian religion, was
the enterprise undertaken.”
Nor was it enough that the institution should be frankly Christian. Its
character as such, as well as its support, must be guaranteed by its inherence in
and not simply adherence to a definite church organization. “Denominational
institutions, gathering about them,” said Dr. Robinson, “the sympathies, and
calling forth the prayers and benefactions of a large and homogeneous Chris-
tian constituency who look to them for leaders after their own heart, in civil
and ecclesiastical affairs, are those that best succeed. Their responsibility is
most direct. Their unity of purpose and effort is best assured.”
Nor was there any fear as to the effective management of an educa-
tional institution so expressing the life of an organic section of the church
of Christ. “For surely,” continues the same authority, “a board of direction
appointed by the church and responsible to the church in her organic capacity
cannot be less united, less wise or less efficient than a self-appointed board.
And living pre-eminently for the church they will live with the church. As
her agencies she will call down upon them the blessing of God. They cannot,
therefore, but live and prosper. These considerations, accumulating force
year by year, have now culminated in the establishment of this University.”
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A rapid sketch of the steps which led to that culmination may now claim
attention.
Though the “idea” dawned about 1845, no formal action could be
taken, “because several institutions were under the general influence of
Presbyterians and these were deemed by many sufficient. ” The earliest syn-
odical action was that of the synod of Ohio (covering the central portion of
the state). A committee was appointed to report at next meeting on the
whole subject of education — embracing particularly the topic of a synodical
college. This committee was continued in 1848 to confer with a similar com-
mittee from the synod of Cincinnati, to receive donations and propositions
for the establishing of a college. But 1849 finds the latter body “disinclined/’
and the former did not think it expedient to engage in the enterprise alone.
But three years was as long a period as these earnest men could check their
enthusiasm, and in 1852 a committee of Ohio synod was appointed to consider
the expediency of endeavoring to establish a Presbyterian college to be insti-
tuted, endowed and managed by the synods of Ohio conjointly. A similar
committee was asked from the synod of Cincinnati, ten men in each. Being
appointed, the twenty were to be authorized to “select a location, prepare a
plan of and secure means for sustaining and make preparation to open such
an institution,” subject to future action of synods. The committee conferred
in 1853, but only with the result that in 1854 it was judged “inexpedient to
engage in this enterprise at the present time.” In the same year the noble old
institution of Washington College, “then under the care of the synod of
Wheeling,” was approved by the synod of Ohio and the way opened for its
agents. The next year it was arranged that funds secured for Washington
College “were to be returned without interest after a use of seven years, if a
synodical college shall be established in this state.”
But that very year (1855) the synod of Cincinnati overtimed the synod
of Ohio and’ that synod again took measures “looking toward the accomplish-
ment of this greatly important object.” The two synods authorized the joint
committee “to devise such plans and perform such acts as may be necessary
to the location, endowment and government of such an institution.” This
1855 action may be regarded as. in an important sense, the starting point. It
gives us about five years before the war, a five years’ interim during the war
(except a single resolution in 1864) and five years after the war until the
opening in 1870.
At this synod Bellefontaine appeared asking the location. No decisive
action was taken, but in 1856 the synod of Cincinnati received definite pro-
posals from Bellefontaine, Chillicothe and West Liberty. The last-named site
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was chosen. Six trustees were appointed and an address to the churches
issued. But when the action was reported to the synod of Ohio it was dis-
covered that Chillicothe was favored and trustees were appointed for that
locality. Naturally a convention of the two synods was called to meet in
Columbus. There, on the 23 d of December, 1856, discussion was had, and
local preferences seemed to be intensified. Finally West Liberty was chosen.
Trustees reported in 1857. Satisfaction was expressed with progress and
the time extended to 1858. But then the funds needed were not secured and
the synod of Cincinnati said “the body of the churches could not be brought
to co-operate in building at West Liberty." The synod of Ohio reluctantly
concurred, but declared that its action must not be “misunderstood as aban-
doning the founding at an early day of such an institution as may be worthy
of the church and the country."
It was a time of discouragement and the “wiser and older men grew
anxious.*’ [Dr. Taylor.] Attempts to unite synods and churches seemed to
fail raid without such united action success was impossible. But in 1839 a
joint committee was again appointed, as, indeed, even in 1858 an arrangement
had been made for correspondence and conference. The joint committee of
1859 reported in i860 on what had seemed an admirable movement toward
Springfield, Ohio, and a possible purchase of Wittenberg College. Both
synods took great interest in this possibility (and doubtless the location would
have been ideal), but the negotiations failed. [The writer well remembers
meeting Drs. Hoge and Robinson present in Springfield about this enterprise
in November, 1859, at a prayer meeting of the First Presbyterian church, to
the pastorate of which church he was called a year later].
Thus we reach another pause in Wooster’s genesis, which was to be
longer than any since the beginning. The war conditions (1861-65) were
altogether unfavorable. A good many things beside the “laws" must be
“silent in war." Only in 1864 the synod of Ohio demonstrated the truth of
its decision of 1858 not to be misunderstood as abandoning the projected col-
lege and resolving that the time had come to resume, directed the trustees
(formerly appointed) to receive offers and asked the other synods to co-oper-
ate. In 1865 nothing effective had been accomplished, apparently, yet Lon-
don citizens and those of Wooster were disposed to make offers. The cur-
rent is on again and incandescence is nigh. Ohio synod, without answer
from the synods of Cincinnati or Sandusky (lately organized), resolved to
go on alone if any place offered one hundred thousand dollars, and it “invited
any synod of the New School Presbyterian church that might be willing, to
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unite with it in this work.” The other synods (O. S.) voted to co-operate.
Thus we reach 1866 when the floating project was to be anchored. Yet it
was odd that in that synod the experiment of establishing professorships in
Miami University “to be held and controlled” by the synods, was entered
upon by Ohio and Cincinnati. Trustees were appointed for this purpose, but
nothing resulted — as might have been anticipated. Too much had been done
in the main channel to permit any deflection. Just now, also, all doubts were
to be dispelled by the Wooster offer of one hundred thousand dollars (includ-
ing the cost of the site) with the two very proper conditions: ( 1 ) the con-
currence of the three synods, and (2) the pledge to endow the institution to
the amount of three hundred thousand dollars, including the amount offered
by Wayne county. The synod of Ohio was in session at Wooster (and it
may be noted that the synod has brought a blessing to the University at every
occasion of its meeting here). What may be called the first pecuniary crisis
now occurs. The subscription lacked thirty-two thousand dollars of com-
pletion. A committee of synod was appointed. It viewed “the landscape
o'er” from the charming campus-site and accepted it as representing twenty-
five thousand dollars, an increased but fair valuation. This, however, left a
deficit in the seventy-five thousand dollars subscription of seventeen thousand
dollars. That the whole affair might be closed, Mr. Ephraim Ouinby, Jr.,
and others came promptly forward with a guarantee for the needed sum,
which was afterwards contributed and the guarantors released. The offer
in this form was promptly and gratefully accepted by the synod of Ohio,
which engaged in the work at once with that of Sandusky. The synod of
Cincinnati did not receive the proposal in time for intelligent consideration,
but gave in the following year the same pledge and co-operated with the
trustees appointed by the other synods. These trustees “met in November,
invited members of the synod of Cincinnati to meet with them, appointed the
required number of citizens of Wayne county as members of the board, and
with prayer for divine guidance made arrangements to secure a charter.” At
the same meeting they declared the object for which and the basis upon which
the University should be founded. They initiated efforts both to secure en-
dowment and to erect buildings. “In 1867 the three synods entered into cor-
dial co-operation, arranged for the perpetuation of the board of trustees and
entered earnestly into the work.”
Turning now for a moment to the liberal and enterprising citizens of
Wooster and Wayne county, whose intelligence and wise-hearted energy and
sacrifice made the University possible, one is filled with admiration for them
and the work they accomplished. There must have been a fine spirit of
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thoughtful benevolence to lead them to make what was at that time an ex-
traordinary offer. The enthusiasm of expectancy was also well developed.
Denominational lines were largely ignored in giving to a frankly denomina-
tional institution. The name of Ephraim Quinby, Jr., heads the list with
twenty-five thousand dollars. R. B. Stibbs subscribed three thousand dollars.
There are nine subscribers of one thousand dollars each. One pledges seven
hundred and fifty dollars, and there are ten down for five hundred dollars
each. More money was needed and much of it given, for furnishing the
central portion of the main building. S. C. Bragg's donation of five thousand
dollars (in books ) and the Purdy gift from Mansfield came in this first period
and the Mercer and Johnson professorships, twenty-five thousand dollars
each, followed soon.
While the people had a mind to the work in raising the funds and the
building, the trustees were busied in poising the institution upon its true basis,
and preparing the way for the opening of its doors. No part in the control
of the University was given to any state officials nor to any one outside of
the synods concerned, though the way was held invitingly open for any like-
minded ecclesiastical bodies of Presbyterian lineage.
Agents were appointed at once and began their work with the dawn of
1867. These were Doctor J. W. Scott (ex-president of Washington College),
Dr. T. K. Davis (pastor at Mansfield, Ohio), and the Rev. Silas Dunlap.
Doctor Scott wearied of the work in three months and was convinced that
the churches could not then be brought to such unity and liberality as would
secure success. The others persevered and were successful. In 1868 (June
30th) the corner-stone was laid with considerable local enthusiasm. Ad-
dresses were delivered by the Rev. W. P. Marshall, of Columbus, and the Rev.
W. M. Baker, of Zanesville. After this an effort was made to attach to the
nascent University the Agricultural College of the state, but it did not suc-
ceed. In 1869 the synods heard the announcement that the sum below which
they would not open the University had been reached and passed. Two hun-
dred fifty-one thousand six hundred and fourteen dollars was the amount re-
ported. It was ‘‘secured mainly from members of Presbyterian congrega-
tions” (Doctor Taylor). This result was in large measure owed to the vear’s
energetic labor of Dr. Oeorge P. Hays and the wisely-planned organization
by which he reached the churches. On the very last day conditioning the
subscription a certain large donation was received on which seemed to hang
the hopes of the indefatigable promoter. The writer has heard him relate
the drive of that day which brought him into communication and enabled
him to announce the completion of the great effort. It has been suggested
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that Doctor Hays should have been the first president of the institution, to
which he was so largely instrumental in giving actuality. Whether this be so
or not, it is a privilege to say that, judged in the light of his noble and success-
ful subsequent career as president of Washington and Jefferson and in varied
lines of Christian work, he would have proven exceedingly well adapted to
the exigencies of the institution’s earlier years. Never was born, perhaps, a
man with more executive talent, more purposeful energy or more real con-
secration to the work in hand.
The largeness of the plans of the founders was made visible in the pro-
jected building, the pictured presentation of which went into so many
churches and homes of the state. Its proportions and capacity, its adaptation
for a department of medicine as well as for the arts and sciences were marked.
Its massive foundations and lofty stories and complete finish from cellar to
mansard rooms were such and so expensive as to overgo all estimates and
make the construction of anything beyond the central section impossible.
But there it stood, conspicuous, upright and downright, provocative of many
a quip and jest, but a solid witness to the intense desire of the founders to build
an institution both broad and deep and high. The year 1870 was a busy one
for all concerned. There was the faculty to be chosen, the curriculum to be
planned, the building to be finished, the students to be secured. But each was
accomplished. Doctors Dickson and Goodrich declined the presidency and
David Swing the professorship of English literature, while the faculty was
being sought. Professors Kirkwood and Stoddard, who accepted, were well-
known in Ohio as educators, and their names gave strength to the selection,
as did the name of that graceful writer, Thomas Fullerton, and the genial, pol-
ished and profound president. Doctor Lord. The plan of endowing a pro-
fessorship by the Sabbath schools of the state (through scholarships) was
admirable in theory but only partially successful. During the previous year
Doctor Hays had made a characteristically bold, but certain to be unsuccess-
ful attempt to carry over to the new enterprise the venerable Washington and
Jefferson College, that institution being then in some embarrassment through
the infelicities of a union of the two colleges as yet imperfectly consummated.
The writer well remembers the energy and skill displayed by the irrepressible
agent of Wooster, as he unrolled the great plan of the new Wooster building
and plead for yet larger possibilities if all could be induced to combine at the
new and promising centre. But the result only proved that Presbyterian col-
leges never die or resign.
Here endeth, then, the story of the period of inception and preparation.
But it has in it material for reflection. The founding of the University
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when it was founded, after what had preceded the founding and all the cir-
cumstances surrounding the founding, may well be counted an event of great
significance in the history of education both as related to Ohio and to general
principles.
i. All men who trace this history must be struck with the fact that
the University owes its origin to no casual impulse nor even to local or even
denominational pride, though both these motives had their place, no doubt.
The founders were actuated by the deepest Christian convictions, as well as by
profound attachment to their own faith and order. They felt the call of
Christ and His kingdom and therefore of all humanity. The original trustees
made this manifest at their first meeting by those remarkable and unexampled
resolutions, fragments of which are so constantly quoted, and which, it must
be borne in mind, have become our fundamental law, because they present
our ultimate object. They are more properly to be denominated constituent
principles than anything which either has been or can be subsequently written.
They must be quoted here in full as they occur in an appeal to the churches,
issued coincidently with the organization of the trustees.
“Whereas. We are deeply convinced that education is a real blessing only
when imbued with the spirit of Christianity and that any enterprise may hope
for success only as it enjoys the Divine blessing and is devoted to the promo-
tion of the Divine glory; therefore
“Resolved: That we enter upon the work of establishing the University
of Wooster with the single purpose of glorifying God. in promoting sanctified
education, and thus furthering the interests of the church, and its extension
over the whole earth.
“Resolved: That we will in every way possible strive to imbue all our
operations with the spirit of Christianity and bring religious influences and
instruction to hear earnestly upon all who may be connected with the Uni-
versity.
“Resolved: That in addition to a thorough literary and scientific course
of study we will aim to endow a chair for instruction in the evidences of
Christianity and the relation of science to religion, and also a chair for in-
struction in the languages, religions, and literature of the modern Fagan na-
tions with special reference to the preparation of young men for the foreign
missionary field/*
These resolutions deserve to stand for all time, not only as descriptive of
a denominational ideal for a single institution and as a prophecy of what that
institution has already so richly and specificallv realized, but as an unassailable
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definition of the nobler education, a clear index to the path of the largest real
success, and a stimulus for all institutions of higher learning to acknowledge
as their final reason for being, the winning of the world for Him who is King
of Kings and Lord of Lords.
Thus the way was opened to the building of an institution so frankly
Christian and churchlv that it could never be charged with any “lack of can-
dor,” or questioned as to the “propriety or intensity” of its measures to make
religion a vital force in all the culture it could ever impart. A real necessity was
felt and only a real creation — even almost a new type — could meet that need.
Xever were ideals more distinct, more intelligently held, or more pervasive of
the efficient body. The synod of Cincinnati voiced the feeling of need in
1868 thus. “Resolved, That in the judgment of this synod the cause of Pres-
byterianism in this state is seriously affected by our want of educational facil-
ities for the young men of our communities, and it behooves us to take the
deepest interest. * * * In the early history of our church our fathers
laid special stress on this matter and, learning from their wise example, other
denominations are now devoting themselves with the most commendable
zeal to this great cause/’ Equally clear and earnest the words of the same
synod in October, 1869: “The synod having heard of the prosperous condi-
tion of the University of Wooster as an enterprise closely connected with our
interests as a church expresses its gratification and thanksgiving to the head
of the church for such a cheering result of effort and prayer in that behalf.”
Then follows the commendation of the institution to the churches for patron-
age, and the welcome to canvassing agents. The denominationalism of the
founders was frank, but it was not narrow. The charter is often referred
to as providing that “any synod of our own, or of any other ecclesiastical
connection, may become a participant in this enterprise.” said participation not
to be limited to “patronage” but to mean real “partnership.” Trustees of any
added synod would vote influence and control with those originally designated.
Synods were asked to commission the board to act ad interim in place of the
ecclesiastical body itself, and the permission was readily granted so that ex-
tension beyond our own denomination (but not interfering with other insti-
tutions) was always possible.
The deep religious spirit of the enterprise was constantly made manifest.
In 1868 the synod of Ohio commended “this interesting and all-important
concern” with all their four] hearts to the favor and blessing of the gracious
God of the covenant, hoping that all our agents will remember that this is a
religious enterprise, that we are endeavoring to found a truly Christian uni-
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versity for all our people; * * * and that many of God’s dear children, out
of their deep poverty are contributing freely, making sacrifices as they do. so
that the church may at length have such an institution.” Deep-rooted faith
kindled this enthusiasm and created a holy confidence competent for the strug-
gle which was clearly foreseen. They welcome co-operation of friends “who
have heretofore keen friendly/’ but now are becoming “equally hopeful and
enthusiastic with ourselves,” as well as the aid of others indifferent or doubt-
ful.
2. It is moreover to be noted that the founders were deeply impressed
with the “great events” which were taking place in the world during the close
of this first period. The preceding decades were crowded with stirring
changes. From 1848 to 1870! W hat a whirl of things in Europe and
America. The troubled current led through the “terrible year”; the rebuke of
Russian schemes by the Crimean war; the far-reaching pact of Paris (1856) ;
the Schleswig-Holstein affair significant of the final exclusion of Austria from
the hegemony of Germany ; the humiliation of the Hapsburgs in the partial lib-
eration of Italy by France, whose presumption led to her defeat at Sedan with
the resulting unification of Italy, the exaltation of united Germany and the
shattering of the Pope’s temporal power — all culminating, together with the
constitutional changes which consecrated America to freedom, just as our
founders quietly opened the doors of the University in 1870. Here were the
signs of new life among the peoples in the midst of the pulses of which we are
yet living. They were beginning almost coincidently with the closing quarter of
the great nineteenth century. They recognized the stress and meaning of
their times and made them the basis of endeavor and appeal. They knew
that “the universities had conquered at Sadowa and Sedan” and needed no
prophet to assure them that the world was surging forward by education, that
the sciences were blossoming with amazing splendor; that ideas were going
to rule the world more certainly than ever; that the need for such leaders as
would not be “blind leaders of the blind” was upon them, and that the op-
portunity was as brilliant as the need was urgent. They saw the meaning of
all this — God bless their memory for it — as touching the interests of men’s
souls as well as toward things political and social and economic; and they
budded even letter than they knew, for even they could only faintly forsee
what these torty years in the world’s pilgrimage would bring forth.
3. Nearer than some of these things to the rank and file of the churches
came the great and happily helpful reunion of the two branches of the church
of their fathers. Clearly recognized was the fact that even the delays to
which the great undertaking had been subjected had fallen out in this matter
rather to final success. Those who were leading knew that they were
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moving in the line of denominational consolidation and development. Sub-
sequent events have shown them to have been wise and far-sighted. If one
branch of the Presbyterian church could succeed in passing the first diffi-
culties and founding the University, a fortiori a united and then reinforced
church can maintain and develop it. The history of this important move-
ment cannot here be given, though that would be a pleasing task for the
writer, who was present at the Newark Assembly in 1864, at the great non-
official but heart-to-heart Philadelphia meeting of 1866, and who was pastor
of the church (Pittsburgh) whence the Old School Assembly filed out to take
the New School brethren in public procession to the church in which the re-
union was made visibly manifest. That which concerns the University is
that the Ohio synods constituted by the reunion were “made legal successors
of the synods formerly united in the control of the University.” By terms
of the act they became “entitled to the possession and enjoyment of all the
rights and franchises, and liable to the performance of all the duties of the
preceding synods” (Dr. Taylor). Trustees resigned. Successors immedi-
ately appointed. Resolution “accepting the trust" adopted. Thus the Uni-
versity passed under the control of the reunited church. While at the begin-
ning the enterprise was confined to synods in connection with the Old School
body, it was felt that the war had removed the chief difficulty in the way of
reunion by obliterating the pro-slavery tendencies in the Old School church,
and that experience had brought the New School churches into harmony with
the other branch as to conducting all great missions of the section by agencies
under its own care and control. Reunion was in the air in October, 1865,
when the college project was effectively revived. There was good reason for
the early extension of welcome (already noted) to any synods disposed to
join in the enterprise.
4. The strong faith and high purpose of this period had their tests as
well as their triumphs. Much encouragement was experienced when the cor-
ner-stone was laid with appropriate ceremonies and vigorous addresses by
Doctor Marshall of Columbus and Doctor Baker of Zanesville. On this, the
first occasion admitting manifestations of popular interest, the demonstrations
were quite satisfactory. Wayne county, perhaps anticipating as certain to
come immediately what would take many years to realize, smiled benignantly
on that thirtieth of June, 1868. That foundation and that corner-stone were
characteristically massive and solid. One could wish fervently that the art
of photography had been then sufficiently developed to have preserved for
us the faces of that group of earnest, self-sacrificing, hopeful and far-seeing
men who must have been at the centre of the multitude of that day. The
trustees say, in the report of that year: “The effect of the demonstration was
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most marked and the public, taking confidence that the enterprise was a reality
and promised success, have taken constantly more and more interest in it/'
The entrance of that incarnation of energy and executive talent, George P.
Hays, into the fiscal secretaryship, took the public to the point of assurance
“of starting not as a child to grow through long years of painful struggling,
but like a full grown man in all the vigor of his strength and energy/' Much
was expected from the projected professorship to be contributed by the Sun-
day schools. “The prospect’" was pronounced “most promising." But diffi-
culties soon appeared. Adjustments were to be made among ecclesiastical
bodies which were themselves changing their organization, and whose future
boundaries were still uncertain having besides various local affinities with
other colleges. One of the newly-constituted synods (Cleveland) declined
a share in control and the resulting responsibilities though heartily commend-
ing the enterprise to the “sympathies, contributions and prayers" of the
churches under its care. There was still hard work to be done in further
arousing the half-awakened sections of the state. One of the agents (Dr.
J. W. Scott, former president of Washington College) retired at the end of
three months, convinced that the churches were not prepared to co-operate
in such an enterprise. Other and older denominational colleges were pressing
on with new life. The State University at Columbus was making its mark,
though founded so lately as 1862 — as a result of the congressional grant for
an Agricultural college. It began to be apparent in 1869 that the earlier en-
dowment subscriptions were not being paid in with the promptness necessary
to secure needed interests for opening the institution. A strong and touching
appeal was made by the trustees : “Our people, bv the unanimity and gen-
erosity with which they have subscribed, have won an enviable reputation
among sister denominations and before the world." Pastors and elders and
leading members were entreated to form a “strong public opinion” for a “per-
formance" of what there had been such “readiness to will," and to “employ
their influence both official and social to secure prompt payment." In the
earlier part of 1869 “times became so hard and money so scarce," that the
culminating point of the endowment (conditional) subscription was about to be
deferred for a year. Finishing the central building free from debt seemed
doubtful. All was pivoted “upon the promptness with which the subscrip-
tions" would be paid, and yet prompt payment was uncertain. Naturally
these were trying times but a “comfortable issue" was at last found.
5. It is also to be noted that the whole enterprise stood in the minds and
hearts of our founders, as a most promising provision for the “defense and
confirmation of the common evangelical faith." They felt that “false philoso-
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phy’’ and “science falsely so called" were rapidly developing. They saw the
danger of attack upon the very citadels of the “like-precious faith," and
dreaded the approach of a secularized and de-christianized public education.
For that reason the denominational college became to them a prime necessity.
This appears in the first resolutions passed by the original trustees and finds
frequent expression in the documents of this period, coming naturally to full-
est declaration in the opening addresses of the next period.
6. It was equally in the thought of our founders that the denominational
college should be the distinctively proper annex to the Christian home. “Our
sons” appear as the basal plea. That plea was plead in thousands of homes
and from hundreds of pulpits. It stirred many a heart to prayer and opened
many a hand to give. In those days of family altars and the consecration of
serious covenant vows, parents felt some anxiety concerning the spiritual en-
vironment into which their children were to be sent. They knew how much
it meant for youth’s plastic years and how much would be determined by that
environment concerning the life-work to be undertaken by those in whom
home affections and church expectations and state needs would meet. When
this sentiment is as true and deep as Presbyterian doctrine and earlier practice
would have it, there can be no wonder that the yearning of the home is for a
college as nearly like the home conditions under which the new generation
has been born and trained, prayed for and prayed with : as can possibly be
found or made.
7. Nor did the founders lack educational aspiration in the midst of their
religious inspiration. They meant to do their best (and they did surprisingly
well, all things considered) to found an institution which should set forward
the higher education in a state already well provided with facilities for that
purpose. Tl “must be ," they said, of higher standing in organization and
scholarship than some of the then existing neighboring colleges. They dared
to hope for equality with leading Eastern institutions. As Western Reserve
liked to be called “the Yale of the West," so Wooster aspired to be called “the
Princeton of the West/’ It was not another college they desired, but a super-
ior college. They declared that they dared not claim a distinctively Christian
and denominational character without putting forth every possible effort to
attain this high rank. They were sincere in emphasizing both terms in the
dedicatory motto Christo et Literis. When in 1869 they put forth more de-
cided claims for half a million endowment, the trustees said. “No less sum
will enable the board to pay such salaries as will enable them to command the
best talent in the country in filling their professorships/’ They had elevated
conception of the faculty they were to choose. They must be “such as would
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send the students away vacation after vacation rehearsing the excellencies of
their professors.” They owed such instruction to the students and thus only
could they gather, they said, “the best students.” They owed such a faculty
to the most sacred interests entrusted to a Christian college. The synod of
Sandusky (1868) invited and urged its people “to exercise enlarged liberality
in aid of this effort to secure a large and ample endowment so that the board
of trustees may place in the institution a faculty composed of men endowed
with the highest order of talent and the ripest scholarship.”
So then, it is plain that our founders were no strangers to the times in
which they lived, to the compass and meaning of the higher education, to the
consecrating touch of sacredness in their trust, to the immense and world-wide
interests sure to be served and conserved by a well appointed Christian college.
They realized that they were building along the line of the world’s progress,
as well as in harmony with the best traditions of their Presbyterian ancestors.
They noted that all Christians in our noble state were willing with them, to
accent every word of that inseparable trinity of the Ordinance of 1787, “Re-
ligion, morality and knowledge.” Nobler motives never actuated any deed
of collective wisdom than those which created the University of Wooster.
Each motive illumines each of the others. Nothing is lacking and nothing is
redundant That undertaking is best which brings out the best in the men
who undertake it. They hold the ideal and the ideal holds them.
More fitting close to this first period’s history cannot be made than to cite
the closing words of Dr. John Robinson's review of it, uttered at the first
inauguration (1870): “Such is the genesis of the idea realized before us
today in this University. With what intense earnestness this idea possessed
the minds and hearts of many members of these synods, is manifested by the
fact that action was taken by one or more of these synods every year (except
1850-51 and 1862-63) for the last twenty-three years. It is evident, more-
over, from this sketch that God baffled our efforts and plans until the very best
time for success had come. In these recent years, a higher conception of the
kind of institution which the age demands has been formed ; the conviction of
the need of such a University has become more deep and wide-spread; reunion
has given us greater strength and called 11s to mightier effort in this world’s
evangelization; pecuniary means are more abundant and a larger spirit of
liberality prevails. This is evidently God’s time for this work. * * *
The world, our own country, the church, struggling and rising, our own be-
loved Zion, the Father. Son and Spirit, look with interest, demand fidelity
and energy, and expect success.”
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PERIOD OF EXPERIMENT.
II. The second period may be designated as that of experiment. The
long course of inception and preparation had done much, despite variations of
progress, to make the conditions favorable. The idea had become familiar
to the people as well as to their natural leaders — the pastors. The Univers-
ity had grown from a felt necessity to a partially realized achievement. Gen-
eral passive consent, however, was far from universal and self-sacrificing co-
operation. The way was just open for a fair experiment. Faith was strong
and success was promised. But many conditions must be met. A mere
name, even though that of a venerable and enlightened Christian denomination,
would not answer to conjure with. There must be a real college and one of
high grade or — bitter disappointment. Yet the means were not on hand to
execute the large plans or make good the confident promises of ardent ad-
vocates. The superstructure was yet to be erected though the foundations
had been well and truly laid. The church's persistence was to be tested. The
state area had not as yet been fully penetrated. Will the endowment notes
be paid as they mature? How can the expenses of the initial years be met?
Will the counsel to patronize given by the synods be ratified by the community
in which so many deep-rooted attachments to neighboring and eastern insti-
tutions presented such positive claims? Will the southern part of the state
come so far — passing on the way old and tried opportunities? Can the high
ideals of excellence, professed and promised, be made actual all at once?
Will the distinctly Christian and denominational character of the University
detract from or aid its development? Can another college adhering to the
lines of the older classical curriculum (though not wholly neglecting the
sciences, yet insufficiently equipped for modern methods of scientific instruc-
tion) succeed in the midst of the abounding and increasing enthusiasm for the
natural sciences and the clamor for a practical education? (The Federal gov-
ernment’s grants were going in this direction.) Can the denominational col-
lege be planted and flourish in view of the new development of the state uni-
versities? The situation was full of thorny interrogatories, despite the atmos-
phere laden with interest and hope.
Well, certainly an answer would be found to all such questions if sturdy
confidence in and outspoken announcement of their fundamental motives and
meaning could avail. Whoever ponders the declarations with which this per-
iod of experiment was entered upon will conclude its failure to have been
impossible if grit and grace go for anything in this world. “We aim at more
than this,” the trustees say [that is more than a high rank among the colleges
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of the land]. “It is a Christian college. It is a Presbyterian college. The
first thought of its founders was born of the necessities of the church.
* * * * Everything pertaining to it has been dedicated to Christ and His
Kingdom. In this day of rationalism and ritualism and vain philosophy, this
day in which so much of the cultivated intellect and so many of the great
schools of the country are drifting away into infidelity and false religion, it is
our purpose to plant here a firm bulwark for God’s truth, and to lift high
above all its towers the banner of the cross.” Again they refer to ‘‘this day of
wonderful events, of Christian progress and missionary enterprise,” together
with the “one hundred and fifty vacant pulpits of Ohio” as calling imperative-
ly for just such an institution. “We would make it,” they say. “not only a
Christian college but a missionary college, a college of revival, a college within
whose walls the converting, sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit shall reign
and from whose doors there shall go forth streams of cultivated, regenerated,
consecrated intellect to make glad the city of our God.” They mention the
joy of the reunion, and emphasize the definite relationship of the church and
the college thus : “Our doors were not opened until all our interests, the
entire control of the institution and every dollar of its property had been
placed in the hand of the reunited synod.” Existence is considered as se-
cured. but whether the “high vantage ground which the wants of the church
and the exigencies of the times demand shall be attained ; whether we shall be
able to build upon the soil of Ohio a Christian university that shall equal
leading institutions and shall be an honor to the Christian liberality and the
consecrated wealth of the Presbyterian church in this great state, depends
largely upon the spirit in which the whole church shall now lay hold of the
work.” Information is to be laid before the synods. “In this wav,” say
the trustees, “the religious character of the University, its general direction
and the safe investment of all its property is perpetually secured to the Presby-
terian church — the disadvantages and dangers both of a close corporation and
of state control on the one hand, and if minute and excessive ecclesiastical
management on the other are effectively avoided .”
Rut the greatest document of this period containing the clearest explana-
tion and most forcible indication of the Wooster ideas, meanings and motives
is the inaugural address of Doctor Lord — the first president. It was de-
livered on the opening day, September the eleventh, 1870. He congratulates
the assembled officers and friends upon the success thus far obtained: “F01
the difficulties of your design,” he said, “were commensurate with its great-
ness. That design was no less than to build another strong bulwark against
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the winds and tides which are blowing and drifting the men of this generation
from truth and life to the shores of error and death: to rear, on broad and
deep foundations, another fitting temple of literature and science conceived
of in their highest forms and widest reach, and ennobled and glorified by the
pervading presence and power of religion. But how formidable the attempt!”
Comparing the situation of three short years before that day, he was amazed
to see the building and to know of the pledged endowment "inadequate indeed,
but revealing a profound interest in collegiate education that is to be broad
and liberal but to be filled with Christian ideas and the Christian spirit, recog-
nizing thus the prime fact that all truth, natural as well as revealed, has its
source and end in God.” Doctor Lord was hopeful that other departments
would be added, constituting in time, a true University. He demanded a
democratic freedom of accessibility to all men. The place for "all studies"
should be the place of studies "for all men.” "The essential test of citizen-
ship in the comonwealth of science and letters should be character , mental and
moral quality and attainments, not condition, race, color or sex." With advo-
cacy of co-education and criticism of the proposed curriculum in favor of
more modern languages, English literature and natural science. Keep the
classics, but do not keep out the "moderns” (as commissioner Harris used to
call them). He denies all fear of the cultivation of the sciences in a Chris-
tian college. "All knowledge leads to truth and all truth leads to God."
Pages of eloquent discussion of this theme follow.’ Proving that knowledge is
theistic, Dr. Lord advances to claim the University for all essential truth
properly called Christian. "But also,” he adds, "the University has organic
connection with the Christian church.” This is not for a narrowly sectarian
purpose, but that "the most direct and powerful influence of Christianity
and its highest safeguards may be thrown around education in the future."
Anticipating the results of the drift from the spiritual to the material. Doctor
Lord says: "The danger is that, if the church has no institutions of its own,
where its voice may be heard and its power felt, there may come a complete
divorcement between education and religion, an issue from which the citizen
and the state may well recoil in horror as from a supreme calamity." * * *
"In the presence of so great a danger it were not wise to trust alone in indi-
vidual Christian men or in small and close corporations to meet and avert
it. Individuals and corporations may change. The limits of a single life have
sometimes proved sufficient to revolutionize cherished opinions and effect the
diversion of great and sacred interests. If there are any surer means or
greater securities by which the aims and benefactions of enlightened liberality
may be guarded, and by which, also, the alliance of education with religion
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may be welded and made permanent, most certainly we ought to have them.
Such means and securities , we believe , are found in the church. If they are
not there, they do not exist. This university, therefore, has its distinctive
character as a temple of learning in its direct and vital connection with the
Temple of God.” Dr. Lord would have brought into the University halls all
the volumes “in which are embalmed the achievements of their learning and
genius, who have added to the sum of human thought and knowledge.” But
he would place above them all the inspired word of God. This he would do,
not to restrict inquiry nor fetter mind, but because we knozv that “the God of
creation is also the God of revelation ; that the hand which laid the founda-
tions of the earth and balanced and lighted the stars, is the same hand that
traced the lines and pages of the Bible.” * * * * “In this belief we
have founded and today dedicate this University.” * * * “It is our de-
sire and will be our aim to make this University an ornament and power to the
church, a pillar and bulwark to the state.” The writer has been anew im-
pressed with the rich content, the forcible diction, the elevated conceptions and
cogent reasonings of this first inaugural. He wishes it might be republished
from time to time and widely circulated among students and patrons as a
clear and convincing statement and vindication of the “things most surely be-
lieved among us.”
The opening day reached its close in the strong address of the Hon. John
Sherman. He outlined his own broad view of what a university should be,
and hoped we might have one in Ohio. His special charge was to build in
with the tendency of the age, which was severely practical, in order to make
the institution really serviceable. The address was, in its pithy and pointed
brevity, its wise counsel to concentration and in its assurance that every dis-
cover}' in nature deepens and strengthens the profound reverence of the edu-
cated mind for the Almighty Ruler and Maker of us all, worthy of its author
and of his distinguished career as a statesman. Impressively did he say:
“Under modern lights the Christian faith shines higher and purer than before.
The inscrutable mysteries of our being — its dependence only on Almighty
power, its yearnings for the dim. invisible life to come, are the ties of human
nature to religious faith. Let the mind be instructed and the preacher and the
hearer alike be left free and as sure as the earth moves in its course the true
religion will prevail.” Such were the sentiments and convictions of Wooster’s
first day.
The conditions favorable for this period of experiment were the fact of
opening with a property (deducting the cost of the campaign) estimated at
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four hundred thousand dollars; a faculty of five professors “eminently quali-
fied for their work/’ ecclesiastical relations settled, a medical department pre-
viously organized in Cleveland and now accepting the new charter without any
fixed pecuniary responsibility resting upon the University ; a collegiate depart-
ment organized and the hoped-for addition of “Law Science.” The building,
unfinished, but massive and adapted in many regards to educational needs, was
highly praised on all sides. Quotations might be made which would now seem
extravagant and yet at that time there was perhaps no superior single building
provided for any Ohio college. Its position and outlook were justly cele-
brated by contemporary journals. Apparatus and library were being rapidly
provided. There were some indications of increase in the endowment.
But reconstruction of the church boundaries (presbyteries and synods)
seemed to distract attention to a certain degree. The disposition of the large
memorial fund then being raised to signalize the reunion of the branches was
held in suspense, and, so far as I am advised, never brought to the new enter-
prise any considerable sum. Yet the work went bravely forward. Admis-
sion standards were at once placed on the same grade with many Eastern col-
leges and with all neighboring ones, and admission was wholly by examination.
Of the new faculty. Doctors Lord, Stoddard and Kirkwood had already won
wide and deserved reputations as scholars and professors. Special personal
talent had been recognized in Frofessors Jeffers and Fullerton. The peculiar
clearness and teaching power of the former has been recognized in every posi-
tion he has since occupied, and the exquisite taste and refined personality of
the other — together with his skill in writing and criticism — remain with those
who mourn for the touch of his vanished hand as the beams of the dying sun
linger long after the flaming disc has disappeared.
The medical department was confidently announced and there were con-
nected with it some of Cleveland’s most distinguished physicians. Four
classes were at once organized and a “Commencement’’ assured for the follow-
ing June. The prevailing spirit was that of congratulation. To quote one
expression: “It was four years’ from nothing to a University which takes
rank with the foremost institutions of the land.” A remarkably full cur-
riculum was offered, based, it is thought, upon that of Princeton. Classical
studies were prominent of course, and intellectual and moral science, yet Eng-
lish and the natural sciences were not neglected. Doctor Stoddard gave spe-
cial lectures on “Mind and Matter,” which were of recognized apologetic value.
Constitutional and international law were provided for, though later the
latter was neglected. Differential calculus was a required study. Civil
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engineering was hinted at. The scientific course, parallel in many things
with the classical, provided for the modern languages. Special courses in
history were promised, associated with other studies, but distinguished by
outlines during the term and examinations at the close. Biblical instruction
was to form a part of every course. Daily religious services were at once es-
tablished upon which, as upon Sabbath chapel, the attendance of all was ex-
pected. The Bragg donation of five thousand dollars for the library began to
be realized. Orders for apparatus from abroad were only somewhat delayed by
the Franco-Prussian war and a confidential assurance was given that more
would be provided as needed. Two literary societies were formed at once. The
attendance for the first year reached sixty-one, two of whom were young
women, and from the beginning the character of the students was fixed as that
of men of character, with the very slightest infusion of rowdyism. The gradu-
ating class numbered six : Messrs. W. A. Irvin, H. L. Henderson, J. E. Kuhn,
J. C. Miller, J. H. Packer, W. R. Taggart. All had taken the classical course.
Three are yet living and in efficient service of church and state.
During the second year a notable addition was made to the faculty in
the person of Dr. D. A. Gregory as professor of mental and moral science.
He took charge also of the English when Dr. Fullerton resigned at the close
of this year. Mr. H. A. Rowland, afterwards famous in connection with
Johns Hopkins University, was made instructor in natural science. The
curriculum was changed by adjustments which were advantageous. Tuition
was slightly reduced, and remission of it to candidates for the University
entrusted to the discretion of the executive committee and the faculty. Schol-
arships were still offered covering tuition perpetually for the modest sum of
five hundred dollars, and four years for two hundred dollars. Doubtless the
experience of such colleges as Washington and Jefferson and Hanover
had proved a warning to our founders. I once asked, being then a member
of the board of trustees, the treasurer of Washington and Jefferson how
many students paid tuition. “Eight,’' was the reply. The rest were being
taught on the ruinous system of perpetual scholarships sold at twenty-five
dollars. The same system comoelled Hanover ultimately to grant free tuition
while recouping itself in part bv an increase of incidental fees. (T may be
pardoned for injecting here the statement that during my father’s presi-
dency at Hanover the scholarship policy was discontinued.) During this
second vear there was an increase in the number of students, and there were
eight graduates.
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The third year was marked by the opening of the preparatory depart-
ment. It was at first confined to a two years’ course. The first superintend-
ent was the Rev. J. A. I. Lowes, an approved and experienced teacher. More
young women were enrolled and the attendance reached one hundred and
seventy-four. The medical department reported an attendance of seventy-
one, making a total of two hundred and forty-five. Preparatory seniors
numbered seventeen and juniors eighteen. Elective courses were now opened
after the sophomore year. The “Brainard” Missionary Society appears.
Tuition was brought up again to $15 per term, and expenses for room, fuel,
light and boarding need not exceed four dollars weekly, and might be lessened
in various ways. A new and most competent instructor in modern languages
was secured, the Rev. Mr. Lippert. A contemporary assures us that “classes
were more thoroughly organized and the work better systematized.” There
were thirteen graduates, twelve of whom had pursued the classical course.
President Lord resigned at the close of the year, partly because the demands
of the work were growing beyond his physical strength and partly on account
of his desire to prepare for publication the results of his former labors in
the chair of theology at the Northwestern (now McCormick) Theological
Seminary.
Despite financial difficulties, partly solved by the recall into fiscal
service of the Rev. L. K. Davis, so successful at the beginning; these experi-
mental years were eminently successful. Dr. Lord was pre-eminent for per-
sonal affability as for mental resources. Organization made progress. The
students met treatment at once courteous and firm. The doctrine of the
University, founded on the duty of the church to care for the higher educa-
tion of her own children by an institution so wholly under her own care and
control as to admit of no question concerning its religious character and
influence, had been successfully commended to the mind and heart of the
great body of Ohio Presbyterians, and was already obtaining credit through-
out the denomination. The future was secure : however, much patience might
be required for a slower pace of development than a first enthusiasm had
expected. The able faculty had proven that men of first-class ability could
be procured for this service of the church, as for other services, without
offering any brilliant pecuniary reward. A spirit of great confidence had
been imparted to the whole inner circle of the founders and was penetrating
wider areas. It was becoming clearly evident that this enterprise was neither
“state” nor private in its origin, meaning and reliance, but represented the
church awaking to a repeated call of one of the greatest needs of humanity
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and of Christ’s kingdom. Coeducation had been vindicated. Reputation
had been established. Discipline of a specifically moral and religious type,
founded not so much on '‘honor” as on conscience and justice, had been suc-
cessfully introduced. Local and interdenominational interest had been shown
to be not only possible but actual in connection with a church college. The
careful inculcation of moral and religious principles had been proven to be
thoroughly consistent with true liberty of opinion. All the main questions
had been raised and answered. The period of experiment closed with well-
ascertained results and therefore with high hopes.
THE THIRD PERIOD.
' III. This we may term the period of establishment. What had been
promised and begun must be performed and carried forward. The question of
means was perplexing, for it must be recognized that necessary expenditures
had to be made before the needed funds had been paid in, while the income
from student fees was inconsiderable. The Cleveland synod's refusal to
share responsibility was not without its effect in a region somewhat uncon-
vinced of the need of another institution appealing directly to Presbyterians,
and already strongly drawn upon for patronage and support by two well-
established institutions in their more immediate neighborhood. Other col-
leges in the state w ere continuing to report to the synods thus claiming, though
with no thought of submitting to control, a certain recognition for commen-
dation and consideration. There was still, in the eastern and southeastern
sections of the state, a considerable leaning toward Washington and Jef-
ferson College and Marietta, and the old affection for Miami, which had
been so largely sustained by members of our churches. Popular favor was
still to be won in larger circles. Sufficient progress must be made, both in
buildings and endowment, to show advancement sufficiently rapid to secure
the larger donations. The third period fitted down upon the second accu-
rately. There was to be no change of principle and none of practice except
such as should more closely conform to and illustrate principle. But that
meant deepening the hold of the university idea upon the whole ecclesiastical
connection from which the chief support of every kind must come. It meant
the constant magnifying of the work committed to the University. It meant
securing wider recognition and co-operation in homes and schools as well
as in churches and synods. It meant making actual that which the period
of experiment had made possible.
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All this Doctor Taylor was prepared to undertake, for he well under-
stood the situation. In this he found a source of strength, and it certainly
was a test of his courage and faith. He met the situation as to Wooster's
exclusive relation to Ohio Presbyterianism with skill and tact. Without
exciting animosities, he was gradually able to instil the conviction that no
other college could possibly bear the relation to the church in this state which
that college bore, the being and life of which sprang from the heart and
purpose of that church after many years of discussion and determined effort.
He made it evident that the “care" of the church could not properly be
claimed when its “control” was rejected. This distinction made its way,
and reports of other institutions finally ceased to be offered to the synods,
though occasionally rendered until about 1885. But it may be noted that the
habit of giving to institutions then considered as quasi- Presbyterian has con-
tinued until some hundreds of thousands of dollars have reached channels of
educational usefulness outside of denominational relations. This only
proves what the Presbyterians of Ohio might have done very early in the
engagement, and may yet do if they come to have a “mind to the work."
One could scarcely think out a man more exactly adapted to the situa-
tion he found than was Wooster's second president. His antecedents were
of the best. He was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1834. His remoter an-
cestors came from England in 1602, settling at Garrett’s Hill, Monmouth
county, New Jersey. He was a descendant of Dr. James Waddell of Vir-
ginia, and a cousin to Drs. J. W. and J. A. Alexander. After their father,
he was baptized Archibald Alexander and, after his own father, Edward.
His father, born in this state, was one of the original trustees, and in his
honor the sophomore prizes were afterwards founded. President Taylor
graduated from Princeton College in 1854 at the early age of nineteen.
Three years later, having completed his theological studies in Princeton
Seminary, he was licensed by the presbytery of Cincinnati in 1857. His
first ministry was at Portland, Kentucky, then a suburb and now a ward of
the city of Louisville. The writer's ministry began at the same time at Jef-
fersonville, Indiana, and a pleasant, though brief, acquaintance was formed
across the river. Sent out from Dubuque, Iowa, six years his home after
the two at Portland, the vigorous and witty sketches signed “Hawkeye”
brought both usefulness and reputation. At the close of 1865 the Bridge
Street church of Georgetown, District of Columbia, claimed him, and in
1869 he took charge of the Mount Auburn church (Cincinnati). His min-
istry there was much blessed for the four years which passed before Wooster
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in 1873 called him thence. He had been a member of the boards of educa-
tion and of church extension and of the board of directors of the Northwest-
ern (now McCormick) Theological Seminary, and a member of the Reunion
General Assembly, Pittsburg, 1869. His name appears in the list of Woos-
ter’s trustees with the opening year, 1870. His well-known literary quali-
fications, together with other qualities, and his intimate knowledge of the
University’s affairs, made him the logical successor of the first president.
Doctor Lord indicated him as his own first choice, and that choice was
unanimously and enthusiastically ratified by the board of trustees. Another
has described him as ‘‘of medium size and kindly aspect, of fine talents and
impressive address, of unusually genial temperament and well adapted to
win the affection of students and to interest all whom he meets in the Univer-
sity, to the building up of which he has devoted himself with all his ener-
gies.” Able, like Aaron, to “speak well,” he was also able, like Moses, to
legislate well. Familiar with what he was accustomed to call ‘the spirit of
youth,” he gave it right of way whenever it kept the right way. Spiritually-
minded and thoroughly loyal to the evangelical and evangelistic spirit, “a
powerful work of grace,” one writes, accompanied the first year and in it
“a large proportion of the students were hopefully converted, some of whom
have already turned their faces toward the ministry.”
At the second inauguration the principles on which the university had
been founded and which it was now successfully reducing to practice, find
most ample and persuasive utterance in the address of the retiring president,
of the board’s president, Dr. John Robinson, and of the incoming president.
They provide a new platform, but one constructed entirely of the tried and
proved material of the institution’s brief but satisfactory experience down
to October 7, 1873.
Dr. Lord claims existence vindicated and foundation firmly laid. Fac-
ulty. curriculum, quality of instruction and government are held to have
gained “the recognition and confidence of the intelligent public.” He em-
phasizes three things which have “materially conduced to this success” :
( 1) organic connection of the University with the Christian church, (2) its
open door to all qualified students irrespective of sex, (3) the wide range
and elevated character of its studies. Concerning the first of these. Doctor
Lord maintained that it was “no new thing.” Both in Europe and in the
United States institutions of higher learning have been founded and sustained
by influences distinctly Christian. This he abundantly proves bv instances
which need not be cited here. “They have all been begotten of Christian
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faith. They have all been sacredly cherished by it.” * * * “This Uni-
versity owes its existence to Christian men of large views and aims with refer-
ence to intellectual culture and attainments, but who at the same time have
an intense belief in the necessity and supremacy of the moral and the spiritual;
who believe that no degree of mere knowledge in the individual or in society
can guarantee truth and right and social order or public liberty, and that
without Christianity states and nations, as surely as isolated men, will
perish. They therefore brought the university into vital connection with the
church. They made this connection not one of a general and undefined de-
scription. hut of essential organism. * * * The intent was not that dog-
matic forms should be visible and have sway here but that the true spiritual
life of the church should touch and consecrate the intellectual life and power of
the University. * * * And the immense value of this procedure cannot
be overestimated. Every day adds to the certainty that in all our primary
and public schools education will be wholly secular.” Sure that this result
must arrive, the retiring president argues that the necessity to which it will
give rise will be “that homes shall be pervaded with Christianity and that
Christian influences shall surround and fill our academies and colleges not
connected with the state. Here they have full access and beneficent opera-
tion.” Happily all that was then feared has not arrived in these thirty-seven
years since passed. There is still, for an awakening sense of our place and
privilege as a Christian nation, a “fighting chance.” That awakened sense
can and will defeat secularism! The Bible is by no means driven from the
large majority of the schools of America. But there is reason enough to
cause anxiety and to summon the forces of truth and righteousness to the
maintenance of the true theory of our national institutions. [See Story's
comment on Amendment I to the Federal Constitution and the decision of the
Supreme Court by Justice Brewer in 1892.] Meanwhile, for the danger's
sake as well as for other weighty reasons, the penetration of our homes
and our colleges with a profoundly Christian spirit is imperative. Doctor
Lord’s address closed with a peculiarly winning and solemn parting word
to the students. He attributes all satisfaction in the restrospect of his life
to having “spent it all. however imperfectly, in the service and for the
glory of the Son of God. In the light in which I now see and with the
feelings which control me, had I a thousand lives to spend nothing could
tempt me to any other service. * * * Oh, may all the students of this
University live and die for Jesus. Farewell.”
Again we listen, on the same occasion, to the noble counsels given the
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new president by that veteran in the university's service of honor. Dr. John
Robinson : ‘‘We all feel intense interest in your call to the presidency of
this university, around which cluster the affections and hopes, and upon
which concentrate the prayers of so many of God’s people. It is yet in
adolescence. You are to bring it to manhood. It struggles with difficulties
growing out of a want of full endowment, intensified by the commercial
derangement and depression of the times. It is hoped you will relieve this
condition.” “This institution is designed as an exponent of the manner in
which Presbyterian Christians would do the work of education. They would
furnish the most complete culture, covering the whole field with deepest
investigation, clearest analysis, most extended knowledge and, added to all,
the elements of the science of salvation.” They would “teach all that may
be taught of earthly science and mingle with this the rules of a stern morality
and the directions and motives of a hearty consecration to God.'’ It is to
be the instrument of the church not only for preparing a ministry but to train
men for “every profession and position of influence whose power may help
to promote righteousness and salvation in the earth — to bless humanity and
glorify God.” Then Doctor Robinson’s charge dwells impressively upon the
serious position toward the students the president will occupy in respect to
their age, their absence from home, the new lives and conditions of thought
into which they would enter. Then his position would be similarly grave
as toward the world at large in view of awakening mind and its incidental
dangers. The church “needs to be felt*’ against all that confuses thought
and destroys morals. “The church looks to you and this University for the
influences and the men to do this work.*’ Then followed the pledge and the
delivery of the keys.
When we reach the inaugural address we discover no failure to realize
the solemnity of the obligations assumed, nor any difference of conception
concerning the fundamental principles. Specially responding to the genetic
idea of the University, Doctor Taylor takes the office “as a minister.” “If
liberal education may not be combined rightfully with religious instruction,
what place have we here?” Three answers to the question as to this com-
bination are given. The first is from “state institutions or independent cor-
porations which have fallen under no denominational control and wherein
no direct religious influence is brought to bear upon students, or, if at all.
in the most formal method.” The second answer comes from “institutions
under general religious influence but not directly connected with any branch
of the church and under no ecclesiastical control.” The third answer comes
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from “institutions belonging to and managed by some branch of the church.
This position zee occupy.” Then the inaugural proceeds to sustain this posi-
tion. For the sake of the state it is important. Quoting from Washington's
“Farewell Address" and the great “Ordinance of 1787," and emphasizing
the authority of Story and Webster that Christianity has been inherited
through the English common law as an integral portion of the law of our
land, he is led to affirm : “We need offer no excuse for the defense of educa-
tion as already bound up with religion in its application to American youth.”
“In proportion as free men are educated they must needs be more religious.”
They endanger us who “attempt the unnatural divorce of education from
religion.” The land fares ill when its men are “trained through non-religion
to irreligion.” He quotes Huxley and Cousin, as well as Cicero and Quin-
tilian, to show that such a divorce should be counted as “inconceivable for
any nominally Christian people.” “From the irreligious college you bring
the youth home without religion in his heart and with irreligion in his head.”
This introduces the second argument, that drawn from the student himself.
If education be defined in terms of the intellect alone, you “obscure the moral
nature” and that means disaster. “What we want from our universities is
not minds so much as men.” This argument finds its logical successor in the
appeal to symmetry of development. Neglecting or lessening the moral sensi-
bilities dwarfs the man. Then follows the argument based on the need o£
the church for such institutions. The laity, in the midst of current unbelief
and plied everywhere with the facilities of infidelity, need Christian educa-
tion. Neglect this and many young men are “lost to the church.” “Reli-
gious stability** in every congregation demands that our youth be “taught
by those who fear God and keep his commandments, and under the shadow
of her own healthful institutions.” The need of more numerous and yet
better educated ministers presses for the Christian college the more the
church is learning to press out into the masses of the non-Christian world.
Our theological seminaries are half empty for want of more and more pro-
nounced Christian colleges. ”
Then the incoming executive reaches the special Wooster feature of a
“peculiar relation to the church.” uThc property of this University and its
end oivm cuts belong absolutely to the Presbyterian church of this state —
to its highest ecclesiastical body. Is there anything inconsistent or perilous
in this fact? Rather ought not the church to glory in it and seek to make
her own institution in every respect worthy of her piety, her power and her
resources? The best method of ecclesiastical control, whether direct or in-
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direct, has been the subject of much dispute and variable practice. The
discussion need not be reopened. Our plan is established and seems to be
working well. Let us have the opportunity and the means to put it thor-
oughly to the test, since it has proved valuable in other quarters. If the
church is to have control of colleges at all, it must be either by the hand of
a single denomination or by the united hands of more than one. We rejoice
heartily in all manifestations of the spirit of Christian unity. * * *
But our way is no less directly toward real unity and the blessing of the
whole church of God because, like our own pulpits, it is under our own im-
mediate direction. The authority of ex-President Woolsey on this point
may be deemed decisive : There is no practical difficulty,' he says, 'arising
from the fact that colleges are in some degree under the control of the
denominations. * * * Here I may be allowed to state what I have
myself observed, that in a long acquaintance with officers of colleges con-
trolled by various religious sects, I have discovered no spirit of proselvtism,
and no important disagreements in regard to the meaning and essence of our
common Christianity. They may cling and possibly with fondness to their
own modes of church government, to the distinctive points of doctrine which
come down to them from their fathers, but they do not differ as to the reali-
ties of sin and forgiveness, nor as to the qualities essential to the perfect
life.’ Our work is thus recognized by 11s, not as educating youth for the sake
of making Presbyterians, but as educating through the efficiency of our
own methods the young for the sake of the whole church of Jesus Christ,
of which we are but a single element. It is not sectarian any more than it
is secular." * * *
Then the incoming executive defines the Wooster "mode of alliance of
education and Christianity." It is to be effective "through the faith, testimony
and examples of teachers who love the Lord Jesus and who desire to lead
every student, both by direct and indirect personal influence, to the same
loving Savior; and through the pursuit of secular studies from the position
and under the constant light of religion. More and more we desire to intro-
duce the study of the Scriptures and of the evidences of Christianity and
to choose for text-books those in which the spirit of Christianity is positive
and prominent.” With these will be joined the daily and Sabbath worship;
and a government "founded upon the quiet recognition of conscience in
every student. * * * Thus we desire to create and maintain among the
whole body of our students a devout and firm Christian spirit which shall
exert its vigorous and positive power upon every one brought within our
circle."
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The administration so well begun continued prosperously. The cata-
logue of 1873-4 bears evidence of the literary taste of the new president and
is adorned with a fine portrait. A decided gain in attendance was realized.
Doctor Taylor took the biblical chair. J. O. Notestein appears as instructor
in Latin. No professor of English has been found, but Doctor Gregory
continues to teach that important subject with remarkable analytic and sug-
gestive power. His “outlines’' are cherished still by those who came under
his instruction. Adolph Schmitz, an accomplished teacher, .subsequently an
author, takes the chair of modern languages. The seniors numbered thirty-
one. Among them our fellow-citizens. Attorney Metz, Mayor Freeman and
Judge Taggart. Juniors are thirty-seven. Sophomores are fifty-five and
freshmen are forty vseven. The preparatory department enrolls fifty-three;
the medical department eighty-seven. The grand total reaches three hundred
and ten. The annual schedule is published. Three courses now run in par-
allel lines, the classical, the philosophical and the scientific. The West-
minster church is established. The location and advantages are more fully
set forth and the “congenial and cultivated society of the city’" is noted.
Some emphasis is laid upon the lectures in hygiene and anatomy, delivered
by Dr. Leander Firestone. There are twenty-eight graduates, and among
them the first young woman to complete the course. Miss Emily Noyes, now
a missionary in China. At the close of the collegiate year Doctor Stoddard
conducts a party of young men on an expedition to the Rocky Mountains,
taking twenty members of the junior class. The fifth year, 1874-5, wit-
nesses a slight decrease of collegiates, attributable to pecuniary stress and
some advanced entrance requirements, but there is an increase in the prepara-
tory department. Mr. J. S. Notestein appears as adjunct professor of Latin,
and Mr. James Wallace as principal of the preparatory department. The
sixth year, 1875-6, brings increased attendance. Junior contest in oratory
for prize, offered by the class of 1875, bakes its place. Dr. James Black
is added to the faculty as professor of Greek, and Mr James Wallace is made
adjunct for the same language. The seventh year, 1876-7, shows steady
increase. The senior class numbers thirty-five, of whom thirty-one graduate.
Miss Ella Alexander (Mrs. Boole), afterwards so well known as speaker and
organizer for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and secretary for our
Women's Home Mission Board, takes the junior prize. Through self-deny-
ing efforts, with lectures and collections by the faculty, the observatory is
built and the telescope installed. Dr. T. K. Davis begins his work as libra-
rian. Prosperity continues in the eighth year, 1877-8. There are three hun-
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dred and twenty-two students in all and thirty-one graduates, but Professor
Gregory, the forceful teacher and author, is called away to be president of
Lake Forest College. With the ninth year, 1878-9, success is yet more pro-
nounced. There are three hundred and fifty-three students and thirty-one
graduates. Professor Schmitz retires and Mr. R. C. Dalzell returns to mod-
ern languages. Strong religious influences are manifest and a gracious
revival is experienced. Testimony is given to the manly character of the
student-body. In the ninth year, 1879-80, new work in oratory is intro-
duced under Instructor Sharpe, and Prof. W. O. Scott is added to the fac-
ulty. The teaching body is made more complete w'ith Leotsakos, from the
Athens University, as instructor in Greek and Latin, and Joseph Collins,
honor man of 1879, as instructor in mathematics. The medical department
has one hundred and six students. The summer term is instituted, mainly
for those who wish to make up collegiate work in arrears. Expenses are
represented as extremely reasonable. Boarding as low' as $1.90 per week
may be found, and unfurnished rooms from twenty-five to fifty cents. For
$2.50 we are assured “one may live in comparative munificence” (?). The
elective study plan, permitting no variation before junior year, is found
satisfactory. The first term of the tenth year, 1880-81, is pronounced “one
of the best and the most successful in faithful study and good order.’* Prog-
ress is quiet and steady and prospects were never more full of promise for
extended prosperity and usefulness. Thus we go forward through the next
years, finding evidences of continued success. In the last year of this period.
1882-3, these evidences were abundant. The gymnasium building is added
and the commencement exercises are held therein, for it is also an auditorium.
Field day is established and physical culture is expected to obtain more
recognition. The catalogue enrolls 500 students in all departments. The
department of music, under care of the distinguished teacher and wrriter,
Karl Merz, is established. With his admirable instruction and entertaining
lectures, the department becomes at once a great culture force in the univer-
sity’s life. The three hundred and fifteen graduates number half as many
at our thirteenth year as “some other colleges have graduated in fifty years.”
The classical course has been especially well maintained. The triennial cata-
logue, ’80-83, shows a total attendance from the opening of one thousand five
hundred and ten students. In the collegiate department there have been
five hundred and ninety-nine. Of these four hundred and seventy-seven have
been men and one hundred and twenty-two women. The preparatory depart-
ment has enrolled nine hundred and eleven. Of these six hundred and ninety-
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four were men, two hundred and seventeen women. Students were present
from more than twenty states. Ten other states than Ohio were represented
by one hundred students, forty of them being from Pennsylvania. Four-
fifths of Ohio's counties were represented. Of the three hundred and
fifteen graduates, two hundred and seventy-five were men, women forty.
Among them ministers and theological students numbered one hundred and
fifteen, attorneys and law students sixty-seven, physicians and medical stu-
dents seventeen, teachers thirty-eight. The preparatory department had
given efficient service in furnishing two-thirds of those who entered the col-
legiate courses. The standard of scholarship had been so well maintained
that students were “admitted to corresponding classes in the larger and more
influential colleges of the East.”
The only regret concerning this period is awakened by the financial dif-
ficulties with which it had to contend. The situation at the inauguration of
Doctor Taylor, as noted in Doctor Robinson’s address, was bravely met.
Overdrawn funds were made good. Two professorships were contributed,
one by Mr. Ephraim Quinby, Jr., and the other by Mr. J. H. Kauke. The
president not only gave himself but a generous subscription of $5,000 beside.
Dr. T. K. Davis’ agency was successful. Nevertheless, the general financial
depression made the collection of many of the smaller endowment notes im-
possible. There can be little doubt that the difficulties in the triple (or
quadruple) official responsibility for the pulpit of Westminster church, pro-
fessorial work, internal management and external representation of the
institution among the churches, together with maintaining the indispensably
constant pressure for patronage and funds, led finally to Doctor Taylor’s
resignation at the close of ten years of most effective and essential service.
The board of trustees earnestly attempted to dissuade him from retiring.
But in vain. No review can be made of this period without ascribing,
after due honor to its able faculty and devoted trustees, very much
of its satisfactory issue to the strong convictions, and winning personality
and literary talent and wise methods of the university’s second president.
He believed heartily in the fundamental theory of the institution, making this
clearly evident so lately as in his address (as president of the board of trus-
tees) at the inauguration of the fourth president. He commended .the uni-
versity from every point of view to its own immediate constituency and to
the general public. Its character and meaning were established during the
ten years of his devoted service along the exact lines of its periods of incep-
tion, preparation and experiment. It would be the most grateful tribute
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we could pay to quote here striking passages from the inaugural address and
the baccalaureate sermons of this period. They are fully abreast of any-
thing which has ever been said at Wooster and of all it has been the privi-
lege of the writer to read of similar literature issuing from more pretentious
sources. There was a specially affectionate seriousness in the farewell ad-
dress to the .class of 1883. and penetrating wisdom and full knowledge of
the whole situation in what may be termed his valedictory to the board of
trustees which stands written out in full upon its records. It may be added
here that Doctor Taylor’s interest in the university continued long after his
retirement from the executive chair. He taught in one and another of its
subjects, became dean of its post-graduate department ( founded during his
administration), gave it the larger part of his valuable library, and was the
president of its board for many years ( 1895-1902). As pastor and editor, his
usefulness to the church continued also to the closing days of life. Wooster
will keep his memory green always. Many testimonials to the confidence and
affectionate respect entertained for Doctor Taylor by the board of trustees
stand recorded in the minutes. We find one. passed after his death, which
occurred at Columbus on the 23d of April, 1903, closes by quoting the expres-
sion of two of his editorial friends, as follows : “Doctor Taylor was a man of
great versatility of talent and wide range of thought, efficient and capable in
all the positions in which he was placed.” Another says. “He was a distin-
guished preacher, a sympathetic pastor, a charming writer, a skilled executive,
a forceful leader and a delightful Christian gentleman. Versatile, accom-
plished, witty and genial, he was a welcome comrade and a valued friend.”
PERIOD IV. THAT OF MAINTENANCE.
In July, 1883, the trustees called to the vacancy created by the regretted
resignation of Doctor Taylor, Sylvester F. Scovel, then pastor of the First
Presbyterian church of Pittsburgh. He was the son of Sylvester Scovel,
D.D., a pioneer missionary who had come from the East in 1829, taking in
charge a rural district near Cincinnati, in which, within seven years, he planted
or nourished (or both) five churches. Thence he had been called to the
superintendence of domestic missions for the Old School Presbyterian church
over a large portion of four central states. For convenience, headquarters
of the mission were fixed at Louisville, Kentucky, whither he removed in
1836. Finding slavery intolerable, his family were made residents of Xew
Albany. Indiana, while the agency was continued until 1846, at which time he
accepted the presidency of Hanover College, Indiana. He may be said to have
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saved the life of this valuable institution, but his iron constitution, slightly
impaired bv severe labors, yielded when the scourge of cholera came in 1849
( July 4th). The son, Sylvester F. (born in Harrison, Ohio, December 29,
1835), graduated in- 1853. The family removed the same year to New
Albany. Four years in the theological seminar}' there brought him to
licensure in April, 1857, and at Jeffersonville, Indiana, he was ordained as
pastor in October of the same year. From January, 1861, to January, 1866,
he was pastor at Springfield, Ohio, and from the latter date until October,
1883, of the First church at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He had no special
preparation for the work committed to him at Wooster, except a close con-
nection with four educational institutions as a member of the board of
trustees (or directors). He wonders now, in the twenty-seventh year of his
connection with the university, how he obtained courage to undertake the task
and accounts for his acceptance by some enthusiasm for learning, a deep inter-
est in young people and the natural presumption of unimpaired health, to
which must be added a considerable share of happy ignorance of just what
the situation and its conditions would require.
The third inauguration in the university’s history took place on
the 24th of October (1883) in presence of the synod of Ohio — the body re-
sulting fropi the union of all synods of the state in 1882. The fundamental
principles upon which the institution had been founded came most appropriate-
ly to expression on the occasion. Dr. John DeWitt (then professor at Lane
Theological Seminary and now at Princeton) made an address as representa-
tive of the synod, the fine rhetoric of which, and still more its condensed but
massive argument, would warrant much fuller republication than can be
given in the following extracts.
“In speaking in behalf of the synod of Ohio,” he said. “I desire to say
something in justification of the intimate relation which this ecclesiastical body
sustains to the academic body whose chief executive officer we have assembled
to inaugurate. The synod of Ohio, an organized portion of the church which
Christ has founded, is the proprietor and guardian, and is ultimately the gov-
ernor of this university.
“We have here an example of a relation common enough in the history
erf the Christian church — organized Christianity inspiring, directing and quali-
fying the instruction intended to promote the higher learning. Here the
liberal arts and the physical sciences submit themselves to the guidance of re-
ligion and here religion appears both as the inspiration and the ultimate
rcffula curriculi , intended to secure to the students a humane and liberal train-
ing.
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“I state the relation between the two bodies, represented on this interest-
ing occasion and united in fulfilling this great trust, in the boldest language
I can select. For it is just this relation of religion to education in which
religion inspires and governs education that, so far as time will permit, I desire
to justify/’
Then the orator proceeded to show the demand for such justification.
The effort to secularize education was never stronger. And among some
most interested in “enlarging the bounds of human knowledge,” prevails a
disposition to dethrone religion. Yet we know that if religion appears, “it
must be given the regnant place. This is due to the nature of religion. It
was only when skepticism had prepared the way for a lifeless and powerless
syncretism that the gods of the provinces stood peacefully in the Pantheon at
the capital [Rome]. To say of religion that it may have a place which is not
supreme is to say that it may have no place. * * * It is a question of
principle, and therefore of vital importance — whether in the educational sys-
tem religion is or is not to be regarded as constitutive, architectonic and dom-
inant.” The so-called conflict of religion and science is then mentioned as
making still plainer the demand for the strongest vindication of the right re-
lation between religion and education.
The synod’s spokesman then proceeded to a selected line of proof that
“Revealed religion when set free, as Christianity, to exert its legitimate in-
fluence on the world, at once and in the most powerful and unique manner
began to assimilate the elements of human knowledge, and disclosed its har-
mony with intellectual activity and its appetency for human learning. More-
over, it stimulated in the highest degree the human mind to increase and sys-
tematize its knowledge, and has thus revealed itself, historically, to be the most
powerful incentive to the search for truth and unity, and the chief factor in
the intellectual training of the race.” After the necessary seclusion of Israel
while the world was making progress in knowledge of nature and the arts,
came New Testament Christianity with just this distinguishing feature — “as-
similation and subjection and employment of human knowledge.” The Greek
tongue was used, introducing its dialectic philosophy and analysis. This was
held to be a unique fact and was regarded “as the intimation of God himself,
in the pages of inspiration, that human learning belongs to religion.” Then
this most competent authority asserted as “one of the most impressive and
instructive facts” in all church history that “from the apologists onward, in
the schools of Antioch and of Alexandria, in Carthage and Hippo, in the
old Rome on the Tiber and in the new Rome on the Bosphorus through the
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period of the ancient church, religion is the great inspiration of intellectual
labor/’ The same influence is traced through the Middle ages and the uni-
versities of the Western world show its power.
This whole history was held to show that while a thirst for knowledge •
actuated this activity, it was “a thirst for knowledge which, in turn, owed
its existence and intensity to the unique fact that Christianity alone among
religions can assimilate and employ all the truths of human philosophy, of
science and of literature.” And our own continent but continues the demon-
stration. “When, therefore, a body representing organized Christianity
founds and guides and fosters a university, it is only true to the spirit of
Christianity as it is revealed upon the pages of ultimate revelation and as it is
manifest in the entire history of the Christian church.”
“We are, therefore,” continues Doctor DeWitt, “no narrow bigots in re-
specting, as we do, in this young and growing university the normal union be-
tween religion and education. We do but act in harmony with the lessons of
history when we make Christianity the underlying, the governing, the form-
ative element of the system of training here adopted and employed. For if his-
tory justifies any system of education as the wisest in its methods, as the broad-
est in its culture, as the noblest in its ultimate fruitage, it is that system which
affirms that Jesus Christ, as represented by Christianity, is the author and
finisher of human knowledge, as he is the author and finisher of religious
faith.” This representative address closes, after kindliest expressions con-
cerning the retiring and incoming administrations, with these fervent words :
“We thank God, also, in this secularizing age, and take courage, confident
that the triumphs of the past are but the pledges and harbingers of greater
triumphs in the future, as, under God, we shall do our part in bringing all
science, all philosophy, all literature and all art into subjection to Him who
is the head of all intellectual principality and power and into unity with Him
who is Himself the ultimate and eternal truth.”
The ceremonies (if it be right to use that word concerning proceedings
far more characterized by simplicity and conviction than ceremony) were con-
tinued by a charge of deep seriousness from the president of the board of
trustees, Dr. John Robinson. The incoming executive was bidden in expres-
sions as firm in their authority as they were gentle in their conveyance of
personal feeling: First, to recognize the times as “peculiar, auspicious and
hazardous.” Mind was said to be awakened. “Practical” education was
clamoring. Rival systems of thought were contending. “Skeptical question-
ings and startling hypotheses” were in the air. And society was breaking out
here and there into “Nihilism.” Therefore, second, this demand of the times
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must be remembered, viz : that the “education given here shall be thorough.”
Truth can be defended only with the “best weapons.” Superficial cramming
will not answer in times when the axe is laid to the root of the tree. “A broad
curriculum and thorough training” must be forthcoming. Thirdly, the execu-
tive was charged to remember that students were being trained as members
of society, and must be learning how to obey law and to preserve order in
their coming life. “They will need wholesome restraint and direction. Sub-
mission to divine and human law is to be prepared for by obedience to college
law. Let your government be paternal, forbearing, by appeal to manhood,
reason and conscience ; vet peremptory if need be * * * but all pervaded
by the spirit of the Great Ruler.”
Especially, fourthly, was he bidden to keep in mind that “this university
originated in and has thus far been conducted with supreme regard for the
interests of Christ’s kingdom. It is the child of prayer. It is the child of
the church — I trust also of God. It is the agency of the church of this state
for discharging her responsibility in the line of thoroughly trained, pious, de-
voted workers for all departments of society. * * * Ultimate and
mighty help in the cause of Christ in the whole broad world — this is the pri-
mary end of its existence, the justification of its being, the vital spirit that
pervades the whole organism. Not a narrow spirit is it, but the deepest and
noblest that a human institution can seek. Where the trust, and peace, the
love and hope and joy of the Christian prevail, the mind is best fitted for safe,
deep and thorough investigation. Spiritual health is at once the best tonic
and mightiest stimulant to intellectual vigor.
“The sheet-anchor of hope for our race is the church. But the church
must have for her ministry men trained to defend her against all the subtleties
of error, to set forth impressively her great system of truth and salvation, and
to push her conquests to the ends of the world.
“In the name of the dear old church, as well as of the board of trustees,
I charge you, therefore, that you make this primary purpose of the university
the chief end of all your arrangements, your government, and your teaching.
Let your teachers be men and women who can say of all their work ‘O Christ,
I do this all for Thee.’ * * * Let consecration to God be the very centre
of the institution and all its works.”
These impressive addresses helped to deepen the already almost op-
pressive sense of responsibility and insufficiency with which the inaugural ad-
dress now came to be delivered. “I stand in some amazement.” said the new
president, after receiving the keys and kindly words from his predecessor,
“before a sinewy, well-appointed, well-settled, yet still developing institution
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with impetus enough already gained to go alone if its parent-body should
forsake it, but with such brawn and promise in its proportions that parental
pride has no notion of such a surrender and would not listen to its saying
‘Corban’ for the world.
“Pushed forward with unexampled energy and success (so far as I know
the history of church-colleges), attaining at once an honorable rank both as
to resources and intellectual products, already planting its taught as teachers,
and preaching in many lands and languages by those to whom it has preached,
sensitive to modern educational progress in its methods, while true to our
changeless principles in its life, * * * I find in the university all the
cherished convictions of my life’s experience and observation recognized and
practiced. * * * I am satisfied with the theory of the institution,
charmed with its judiciously outlined courses of study ; and shall be, I am sure,
responsive to the many wants I perceive yet to be supplied. And I promise
you faithfully to press them upon you and the communities you represent to
the full extent of my opportunities and of your patience.
“Now, therefore, relying upon you (as I trust we shall both rely upon
God), to the development and not to the alienation of this great interest I
(daring reverently to use the words of my father’s inaugural) ‘give myself
this day.’ ”
The theme of the inaugural address was “Intellect and Character.” No
disparagement of the first is necessary to the supremacy of the second. The
powers of the human mind, nearly illimitable, are to be exalted, directly in the
interest of character. “For if intellect be so much what must character be,
being more?” The asserted supremacy was proven by demonstrating that
character conditions intellect: i, in its exercise: 2, in its development; 3, in
its safety; 4. in its usefulness; 5, in its enjoyment; 6, in its final result. The
danger of “an insane devotion to the intellectual as opposed to the moral”
was pointed out. The danger is a “return to an essentially sophistical per-
iod in which man shall float about in an endless whirl of shallow thinking with
no fixed moral convictions to guide and no religion to ennoble. Out of such
a period will come a world as fully given over to a false intellectualism as ever
the antediluvian world was surrendered to a false animalism.”
The address closed with sentences tracing the relation of the theme to the
university. “Gentlemen and brethren, we are certainly building into the
largest and surest forces of human nature and therefore, hopefully into the
widest plans of the beneficent Father of all in His education of the race,
when we consider this principle settled for this institution and actively apply
it to the institution's whole inner life. Our ideal must be that of a careful
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and thorough intellectual culture under the continuous pressure of an atmos-
phere of conscience and duty. This dominant idea must so shape our cur-
riculum that no character-making study, gentler or sterner, shall be omitted.
Our motto demands this. Christ and character are, in a certain high sense,
synonyms. * * * He taught its elements, exemplified its highest type,
commended and commanded it to all men, and made the issues of eternity
pivot on it. We shall never wander from Christ while we make character
condition all our intellectual discipline and we shall never misconceive char-
acter while we hold fast to Christ and keep him first in our motto and our
hearts.
“But to realize this ideal in its perfection, to transfer this theory, in all its
amphtude, into practice, actually to form character — a far more difficult task
than to train intellect; to overcome moral inertia; to neutralize poisonous
forces; to evoke motive power and supply direction — ‘Who is sufficient for
these things?’ Let us invoke the only power which can bring to pass that
which we long, above all things else, to see accomplished.”
This much has been necessary to make it manifest that the initial ideas
and views and purposes had suffered no alteration or diminution up to the
opening of this fourth period. The clear duty for the future was as evident
as was the behest of his times expressed in the motto of William the Silent
“Je maintiendrais.” It became the inspiration of the next sixteen years in
the history of the institution, and a modest development resulted as must al-
ways be the case where a living organism is maintained.
The period had need of strong support, as it coincided with an epoch
of rapid development in neighboring institutions. Ohio State University,
which began its marvelous career in 1862, obtained, largely because of the ex-
ample of Michigan's liberality to Ann Arbor, an even more ample supply of
the appliances appropriate to the most pronounced educational tendencies and
demands of the day. Miami was reopened and Ohio University reinforced.
Oberlin's semicentennial came on, signalized by donations of hitherto unex-
ampled generosity. Tne Case School of Technology was rising. Western
Reserve University had passed through its period of struggle and was firmly
fixed in the affections and benefactions of a large constituency (and largely
Presbyterian) in Cleveland. The same was true, in various measures, of
Marietta, of Hiram and Mt. LTnion, and Baldwin and Denison. Just on our
borders flourished again dear old Washington and Jefferson, with the new
and vigorous institution planted at Grove City, Pennsylvania, bv that marvel of
energy and capacity. Doctor Ketler. It was something to have kept fairly
apace with the general advance of the whole column.
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One of the first things to receive attention was the equipment of the gym-
nasium building and its actual use for something more than an auditorium.
This was accomplished and awakened an enthusiasm which it would be difficult
to restore even for a much finer and more appropriate structure. Almost
coincidentlv military drill was added, thus providing for a physical culture
efficiently supplemental to the gymnasium. The services of competent direc-
tors were engaged from time to time and a continuous record for good health
among the students was preserved.
In examining the reports for 1884-5 *he board of trustees noted a larger
attendance of students, the whole number having reached four hundred and
sixty. Already three hundred and seventy-seven graduates had been sent
forth (in fifteen years) and they were widely dispersed in the world. Grati-
fication is expressed by the board of trustees with the disposition of the varied
work, with increased efficiency of instruction, with successful government,
with progress in the preparatory department, and with the removal by pay-
ment and pledges of all accrued deficit. It is noted with pleasure that Wooster
has been furnishing more candidates for the ministry than any other college
in the country except Princeton and more in proportion to the number of
students than Princeton itself. It was maintained that already the university
was becoming what the first president declared on dedication day it would be-
come— “an ornament and power to the church, a pillar and bulwark to the
state, a chosen and cherished home of literature, the arts and sciences.”
It was becoming steadily more evident from the practice of neighboring
institutions as well as from the growth in equipment and curricula of high
schools in Ohio, and their increasing employment of college-graduates as
teachers and administrators, that some form of closer relationship between
them and our university must be devised. It was not without serious study
of the situation that the change was made from the original custom of receiv-
ing students only upon examination. A certificate plan was adopted by which
the first place of the applicant should be determined under condition of sus-
taining the classification accorded during the first term. This became a gen-
eral movement and was sanctioned by the Association of Ohio Colleges. It
has done much to counteract the disposition, especially among the boys, to
sacrifice the advantages of the last years of the high school, and has largely
increased the number who press on from the secondary to the higher educa-
tion. This method of entrance was authorized by the board of trustees in
1885. Care was exercised from the first to ascertain the exact character of
the work done in the accredited schools. Coincidently a change was made in
the curriculum which gave a better arrangement of studies in the natural
sciences and the preparatory course was broadened.
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Through some years, up indeed until 1891, efforts were made to sustain
and develop certain academies into more or less intimate relations with which
the university came. Visits were paid to these academies and such moral (not
pecuniary) aid given as was possible with the faculty force then available.
South Salem, Poland and Central College academies were co-operated with.
Green Springs Academy was accessible if the university could have undertaken
its administration and the payment of its indebtedness. This academy and
that at Hudson were liberally assisted by Western Reserve University, but
without any reasonable return for the expenditure and were finally abandoned
(see Dr. Haydn’s History of Western Reserve University). The whole acad-
emy idea, once so prevalent and so really serviceable in Ohio, was moribund.
The high school provisions became so ample and accessible that support of the
other class of institutions became unnecessary. Constant efforts are now made
to interest the high school pupils, and especially by the state colleges, which
claim to constitute the natural termini of the whole system.
Some progress was made as to attendance. The catalogue of ’87-8
records the first freshman class, I think, which reached one hundred. Seniors
were forty, juniors forty-nine and sophomores fifty-five. Counting all de-
partments, the enrollment reached seven hundred and fifty -seven. The de-
nominational machinery was invoked in a request to have a standing com-
mittee in each presbytery to keep the university before the churches, and each
presbytery was asked to send annually a visitor. Propaganda was also sought
through a little journal, “The Christian College. ” It promised to be valuable,
but an unfavorable interpretation of the postal statutes made its continuance
unadvisable. More liberal interpretations are now made and with great ad-
vantage to the college world. The board’s meeting of 1887 had been con-
sidered in its records as “peculiarly glad and hopeful.” in view of no deficit,
increased attendance, and the completion of the twenty-five thousand dollar
endowment of the Hoge chair of morals and sociology. This endowment was
raised through painful persistence in finding smaller sums on the basis of Wil-
liam Thaw’s initial subscription of two thousand five hundred dollars. It was
intended to allow the introduction of a chair of biology. This was authorized
in June, 1887, but we could instal it only inconveniently in the fourth story
of the main building.
The baccalaureate sermon of that year was the call to “Go Forward”
(Exodus xiv:i5). It was contended that our university was so clearly “of
the stock and tribe of Israel” that we might rightly interpret our circumstances
as the call of Divine Providence to push on — though only omnipotence could
open the way for us through seas and deserts to the borders of the promised
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land. The special plea was for the sac red ness of our enterprise as against
those who thought of it too much as a secular thing, and with no special
covenant relation to God and his church. In much the same way the dedica-
tion of our university to the country through realization of our Presbyterian
educational traditions was urged in the baccalaureate of 1888. “Wisdom and
knowledge shall be the stability of thy times. “ (Isa. xxxiii:6.) It was the
centennial, approximately, of our federal constitution and of the full organiza-
tion of our denomination in the first general assembly.
In June, 1890, the board of trustees approved of changes in the cur-
riculum and the introduction of a larger scope of electives in the higher
classes. That improved curriculum went into effect at once and constituted
a distinct advance. Just at this time, also, came the missionary alcove in the
library, with improvement of the gymnasium and the employment of an in-
structor, plus the enlargement of Old Music Hall. They were not great
changes, but they facilitated our work and each brought its own gratification.
The alcove owed its origin to the talent and self-denial of one of the professors
( Xotestein ), who had gained a prize of three hundred dollars for an essay
on an important politico-social theme and dedicated it to increasing intelligent
interest in that which he has always and justly contended was Wooster's con-
structive idea — the winning of the world to Christ. An important step was
now taken in filling the hitherto vacant chair of Biblical instruction and com-
bining with it the pastorate of the college ( Westminster) church. The uni-
versity was every way fortunate in securing, at some pecuniary sacrifice to
himself, the Rev. Edgar W. Work (’84), then pastor at Van Wert, Ohio.
The board filled the chair and protested against the relinquishment of a
thousand dollars of salary by the president in partial provision for the incom-
ing professor. But that release of salary continued until the final vacation of
the executive office in 1899.
The assistance of Doctor Work in teaching and in the pulpit was the
more necessary that the means might be founded for enlargement of the main
building. The board resolved (June, 1890) that, “urged and encouraged by
the growth of the institution and the growing demands of the higher educa-
tion, we proceed immediately to raise the sum of twentv-five thousand dollars
for additions to our central building, and the additional sum of five thousand
dollars for additional heating apparatus now imperatively needed." The synod
approved, much begging was done, the fund grew and in June, 1891. the hoard
“took recess till after the laying of the cornerstones this afternoon." It was
1892 before the work was completed, at a cost (with new laboratories and facil-
<3 0
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ities) of more than forty thousand dollars. We had reason to be grateful
that just at a moment when further progress seemed especially difficult the
legacy of Selah Chamberlain (elder of the Second church of Cleveland) came,
most unexpectedly, to our help. The inspiration of this gift, ten thousand
dollars, lifted us over the difficulties at once. The added accommodations
were a relief beyond what can be appreciated by those who have not passed
through similar experiences of hampering restrictions and their removal. It
was like a new life in some departments. The architect might facetiously call
the architecture "factory-style” and the many windows did admit the “canid,
cauld blasts” of our occasional blizzards. But it was “factory-style” in the
other and more important sense. We filled its larger spaces with the hum of
enlarged intellectual industries. The improvement increased our library
facilities, relieved our embarrassed hallways, and brought all the natural
sciences into a new and deserved prominence. We thanked God and took
courage.
In 1892 the granting of Master of Arts in cnrsit was disapproved and
the faculty authorized to carry into execution some plan for bestowing the
Master’s degree. But the execution of this decree was arrested for years
by failure of the Ohio Association of Colleges to stand together for the much-
needed reform of a discreditable practice. Items of gratification appreciated
by the board of trustees in June, 1893, were “enlarged preparations made in
some departments for special study; the healthy religious life of the univer-
sity throughout the year, the increased interest in the work of the literary so-
cieties, the furnishing of the Willard and Lowell society halls, the success of
Wooster’s representative in the state and interstate oratorical contests; the
encouraging growth of the post-graduate department, and the very large
matriculation of new students during a year of great financial stringency.”
It was recorded that, “with the forty-eight thousand dollars expended on
recent improvements,” the university now represents contributions in property
and endowments “of not less than half a million dollars.” “It presents in
its solid basis of property and patronage and in its unique relation to the Pres-
byterian church of Ohio, a signal opportunity and a cogent argument for
progress. Its present and possible future value is becoming annually more
evident."
From the beginning it had been felt that cottages for the young women
were desirable. The feeling grew with experience and an organization of
ladies had been formed to advance that interest. As early as June, 1884. the
board of trustees recognized the need as one of highest importance, but it
was not until 1895 that the donation of Mr. Hoover, made in 1894, could be
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utilized. The cottage bearing his name was opened in January, 1896, and
proved at once helpful and attractive. The committee was fortunate in its
selection of a place and the structure remains a worthy member of the new
group of buildings, because a true cottage, at once homelike and convenient.
In the catalogue of 1894-5, as the twenty-fifth year was reached, a special
declaration was made emphasizing the denominational relation of the uni-
versity : “The denomination to which this university belongs has, during this
period, finally settled its own policy as to denominational colleges by erecting
a special board to represent this great interest. The basal principles in the
assembly in the wider work and the synod in the university are identical and
it is certain that the churches will ultimately respond to the plans of both
bodies." Allusion was also made to the general assembly’s establishment of
“College-Sunday,” from which much was hoped. Through this close re-
lationship much that was gratifying had been accomplished in the twenty-five
years past. “By further extension and intensification of it the next quarter
of a century will far surpass the record of the first.” Only fifteen years are
gone and already it is evident that these words were prophetic. Faith in the
church, so confident in 1895, has abundant justification in the university of
1910 and will find further ground of assurance at the semi-centennial in 1920!
During 1894 (February) the present writer had opportunity to plead the
cause of Ohio’s many colleges before the Ohio Society of New York. In
that plea Ohio was presented as not ashamed of the fact that most of her col-
leges were denominational. “She takes good care that not one of them shall
be sectarian in any offensive or unchristian sense, and each one of them con-
tains the neighborhood representatives of every form of Protestant faith.”
It was held that this condition of things was the logical sequent of the his-
torical facts that Ohio was the first meeting place of the various population-
elements in their new movements just after the Revolution and that all forms
of church organization were planted very early on Ohio soil. It was declared
to be in harmony with the noticeable fact that we had no metropolis in Ohio
and needed none — our three great cities being ideally distributed for effective-
ness in state control and for extended commerce and trade. Ohio has a claim
to being the spot from which shall emerge the typical American character, and
the typical American must come largely from the ranks of college-culture.
It was claimed, moreover, that Ohio colleges were making a record in “draft-
ing the best brains into the service of the world’s moral and spiritual interest,”
and that “Ohio college people, professors, trustees, patrons and students are
Fappy in putting forth year by year a healing touch upon the whole vast
world from which, Ohio men of New York, you are drawing your vast pecuni-
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ary gains.” The many colleges of Ohio provide the choicest product of
Ohio’s greatest industry — that of “making men , the most men and the best
men ” Her numerous colleges are her “declaration of faith in the average
man. She resiliates from Carlyle’s Konigniann and “gigmanity” and from
Caesarism and all that. She knows there is no aristocracy of brains. * * *
She holds to her heart the real source of her pride — those who in church and
school and state have demonstrated that the tough resolution of medium or
narrow circumstances finds just the fibre it needs in the strong frame, the
healthy brain and the high morals of her Tom Corwins and her Abram Gar-
fields. * * * Instead of offensive discriminations, we open our college-
doors to all races, as to all fortunes. * * * Who doubts our need of
men? And who denies the traditional belief of the race since Charlemagne’s
universities that the colleges are the seed-plots and propagating houses for
men. * * * Men are not accidents. * * * It requires the highest
social vitality to start them, and the most assiduous care to protect them, and
the most ingenious devices to direct them, and winds from all quarters to
deepen their roots and straighten their trunks, and sunshine from favoring
social conditions to stimulate them and the purest atmosphere for the leafy
respiration of them and the richest soil for the burrowing roots of them.
All, sirs, and all at their best — as when nature summons her marvelous ener-
gies to rear some incredible triumph of vegetable architecture like a Calaveras
pine four hundred feet high. The task and tax of every community that has
ever risen to the elevated consciousness of Christian civilization is the rearing
of men. It demands the supremest energies and repays the most lavish ex-
penditures. And that is the reason Ohio’s surface is dotted with colleges.
And that is the reason why so many of them are so rapidly increasing in
everything that helps to form and fashion manhood. And that is the reason
they can afford the reproaches sometimes cast upon them, and even the partial
disloyalty of those who overlook them, because they have faith that the waking
passion for man-making will presently overcome the passion for gewgaws and
frippery. And then, sirs, they will be, every one of them that does its work
honestly, as large as any college had better be and as thoroughly equipped as
every college ought to be. * * * Last of all, we extend the great pur-
pose of Ohio, through her many colleges, from man-making to the making of
public men. * * * What kind of public men do you want Ohio to pro-
duce? Are American statesmen needed to preserve and guide that which has
demanded hecatombs of sacrifice to win and build? * * * Where then
is the broad foundation to be laid which prevents men from becoming doc-
trinaries with Guizot on the one extreme, or opportunists with Gambetta on
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the other, and poises them as saviors of the country with Thiers in France
or Cavour in Italy and our own peerless Washington? Where, I say, but in
our colleges in which eager youth are held in check to ripen, and fed while
they grow, and stimulated to the noblest views of patriotism and cosmopolitan-
ism before they go out to the frequently narrowing tendencies of practical
politics? And in what colleges if not in Ohio’s colleges? I believe in Ohio’s
young men of the twentieth century. * * * Aye, sirs, our past and our
present assure us of the best material the sun ever shone upon. And the
colleges of Ohio, linking hands with the \Vhole secondary education, are press-
ing eagerly forward toward the goal of an ideal fundamental education of
statesmen. * * * In the whole Ohio college policy there is nothing but
that which has come through our great commonwealth's historical develop-
ment. Nothing which does not already go powerfully toward manmaking
for private life and public, and therefore everything to set forward and develop
with a generous and confident loyalty."
The writer of this sketch was asked to introduce an admirable volume by
Prof. John Marshall Barker on “Colleges in America," and wrote (in July,
1894) thus: "1 cannot be unwilling to avail myself of any opportunities to
turn the attention of the Christian public to the Christian colleges. It is a
noble public and an equally noble object. I can conceive of no worthier thing
than the care-taking of one generation that the next one. which must neces-
sarily lie so long under its influence, and for which it is therefore so thorough-
ly responsible, should receive a Christian education. To put Christ at the
center and make Him felt to the circumference (as Bungener said in speaking
of Calvin’s school-policy) is exceedingly difficult. But it is exceedingly im-
portant. It is, indeed, vital and pivotal.” The dangers which surround this
ideal were noted and traced to their causes in "general worldliness; specula-
tive infidelity ; lowering the Bible from supreme consideration ; false theorizing
with regard to the limits of government and the liberty of conscience issuing
in the demands for utter secularization of the states; the divided opinion of the
church universal.” These dangers were held to be both "imminent and actual.
One section is thrown over towards utter secularism in public education by
recoiling from a church education, exclusive and reactionary. The leading
of the little child — the favorite indication of the millennium's arrival — is frus-
trated amid the clamor of the free thinkers and the uncertainty of the church
and the (supposed) necessities of the state. We are slowly but surely, if we
go on in this way, taking our children out of Christ’s arms and our youth
from beside his footsteps. And that is at once the most fearful sin against
Him and the most terrible injustice to them we could possibly commit. Who
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can do anything to stay this destructive tendency? “God bless him,” 1 would
say in Livingstone's spirit, “whoever he may be, that will help to heal this
open sore of the world.” I believed that Mr. Barker’s book would help as I
am convinced the astonishing success of the whole group of Ohio’s denomina-
tional and Christian colleges has helped powerfully. These expressions of
conviction are given space because they are but the common opinions of all
who have given devoted service to Wooster LTniversity as to many others of
the group mentioned.
No special effort was made to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary in
1895. The board of trustees recorded its “gratitude that the institution has
more than fulfilled the most sanguine hopes and purposes of its founders in
the quarter century of its past history.” By this we are to understand, of
course, thankfulness for progress toward the original ideal. The attendance
had reached an aggregate much beyond three thousand in the collegiate de-
partment alone — the graduates approaching eight hundred. The number of
missionaries and ministers sent out had equaled forty per cent of the male
graduates, and next in order followed the number of those who had entered
the profession of teaching. Three hundred thousand dollars of productive
and promised endowment were counted upon, buildings had been erected for
astronomy, gymnastic instruction, and musical culture, with other such im-
provements as gave ample equipment for laboratory, library and literary
work. The faculty had been enlarged and those now occupying the chairs
had acquired invaluable experience. The inner history had been marked with
unanimity and there had constantly been in attendance a large majority of
Christian students fairly representative of the homes of the university’s con-
stituency. Coeducation had proved successful. Cases of discipline had been
comparatively infrequent, though a high standard of conduct had been re-
quired. Some gracious revivals had been experienced and the religious life
of the university had been quickened constantly bv earnest work on the part
of the Christian associations. The outlook for further improvements was
regarded as decidedly encouraging. Large advance in every direction was con-
sidered as not only imperatively demanded but as just within reach and the
settled church relationship of the university was regarded as a sufficient guar-
antee of large expectations.
The twenty-sixth year (1895-1896) was the transition year to a much
improved curriculum with additional electives. The attendance during the
following four years was not quite sustained, probably owing to increasing dis-
satisfaction with the continued exclusion of intercollegiate games, a policy
adopted in June, 1891. The totals, not reckoning post-graduate or medical
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students, but including summer students, were these: For 1895-6, five hundred
and eighty-nine; for 1896-7, five hundred and sixty-five; for 1897-8, six hun-
dred and thirty; for 1898-9, six hundred and ninety-four. Subtracting the
summer students, the totals were respectively five hundred and forty; four
hundred and twenty-five; four hundred and twenty-three; four hundred and
eleven. Regarding only the collegiate department, the totals were respectively:
two hundred and sixty-nine; two hundred and forty-three; two hundred and
forty-seven ; two hundred and forty-four.
At the close of the commencement exercises of 1897, on an issue con-
nected with collegiate dramatics, the president tendered his resignation to the
board, which had not sustained a policy to which he was conscientiously com-
mitted. It was to take effect at the close of the following collegiate year, the
expressed wish and hope of the president being that by special effort the insti-
tution might be entirely freed from debt. The issue was submitted to the
synod in October, which put on record a declaration sustaining the president’s
position. In the following March, he stated that “the resignation placed in
the board’s hands at the last commencement and held in abeyance according to
the request of the board, is now withdrawn, because the occasion for it then
had been removed in his view by the action of the synod at its last meeting,
which has fixed the policy of the institution in the matter then under con-
sideration. He then offered his resignation, constrained by the conviction
that under the present circumstances the needs of the institution demanded the
trial of a new policy for its development, i. e., an executive president. He
wished to open the way for this policy and to do all he could to persuade the
board to adopt it.” (Minutes Vol. II. p. 37.) The resignation was accepted,
the services of the retiring executive were continued in the chair he had already
occupied (Hoge professorship of morals and sociology) and kindly resolutions
were passed. Some gratifying things were mentioned in the board’s reports
of 1898 (June). “The close of the administration of the retiring president
leaves matters in an excellent condition for the one who shall be chosen to
follow him, who will add, we trust, another record of advancement in strength
and influence to the already remarkable career of the institution.' ” Thanks
were tendered to the faculty for the “generous and self-sacrificing spirit they
have exhibited in contributing during the past year one-tenth of their salaries
to the financial relief of the institution/’
The presidency was tendered to the Rev. Dr. J. C. R. Ewing, of the
Presbyterian College at Lahore, India, but his missionary zeal would not per-
mit him to accept it. Thereupon the board requested the former president
to continue in the discharge of the official duties so long as would be neces-
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sary. This tenure extended throughout the following college year. The
board took a contented view of the year and a confident view of the future
mainly because success had again been attained in relieving the institution
from all indebtedness. “Hopefulness/* the record reads, “seems to pervade
all ranks that the university of Wooster is upon the eve of a new era of use-
fulness and prosperity.” The board expresses the greatest anxiety that “the
faculty in all its plans and work as well as the individual professors in all their
contact with the students” should “labor unceasingly for the cultivation of
the hearts no less than the minds of those committed to their training.” The
presbyteries were again requested to appoint two visitors annually in order that
the university might be brought into “closer and more vital relations with the
churches/' It was also advised that “earnest and successful pastors'* should
be invited to spend Sabbaths now and then in the college pulpit. A high-grade
teachers’ department was advised and the expediency of keeping in touch with
the teachers of the state was urged. The board concludes: “Now is the time
for all friends of Wooster to join hands to push forward and enlarge the
work of our beloved university. We must have half a million of dollars in
the next ten years to equip the university so that she can offer all the ad-
vantages which any other institution can offer within the borders of our state.
We must attempt great things and expect great things as servants of God.
* * * Let our motto be: ‘Xo second place’ for Presbyterians in the edu-
cational field in Ohio.”
In closing the review of this period, the financial aspect of it deserves
notice. It proved, fortunately, the end of the system by which the president
was to be responsible for the pulpit of Westminster church, general adminis-
trator. even to giving excuses, charged with the duties of a full professor-
ship and still expected to represent the university among the churches, to plead
its cause before the synod and to beg from door to door the funds necessarv
for maintenance and development. These various tasks could not all have
been carried forward in any fashion but for the kind cooperation of the fac-
ulty. the timely help of the board of trustees, the confidence shown in the idea
of the university in general response by contributions and patronage. Per-
haps it was necessary that this stage should have been continued for the first
twenty-nine years of the university's career, with occasional help from finan-
cial agents — who found their work exceedingly difficult. But it is a matter
of congratulation that so feeble and inadequate a policy should have been now
and forever abandoned.
During this period there were dark days, but there were also bright ones.
Xow and then the ledger closed with the balance on the right side, fust at
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the time of need came the larger donations, securing the Hoge professorship,
the Brown professorship (in a single gift), the Hoover and Chamberlain
sums, which secured the two building projects, the generous Pratt gifts,
the most timely and helpful bequest of Judge Robinson, the property gift of
the Aylesworth will and many another gift for scholarships and improve-
ments. On the whole, while it was a constant struggle, there was at no time
defeat, but always a reward of success in modest proportions. One of the
pleasantest memories of the years will always remain the generosity of the
institution to those to whom it extended free tuition (and the privilege of
giving a note to those who were neither children of the ministry or candidates
for that office or the mission field). As early as 1885 the sum so given for
that year reached five thousand forty-five dollars. In the following years it
approximated four thousand dollars. In 1890-1 it was four thousand seven
hundred and fifty -five dollars. It was not changed despite the pitifully small
sum of the annual contribution solicited to meet this drain upon the funds, until
1897. when it was reduced to one-half instead of full free tuition. The writer
is thoroughly convinced that this generous view of the university's opportun-
ity to serve the church from which its life was drawn, has had its reward, and
that this policy has powerfully aided in demonstrating to the church that the
university is an indispensable instrument in advancing the work for which it
was founded — the frankly avowed object of winning the world for Christ.
PERIOD V THE PERIOD OF RAPID DEVELOPMENT! THE NEW WOOSTER.
The previous periods have shown us a development apparently arrested
in some directions and not rapid as a whole; but they have given evidence of
a solid foundation on which to build and of quiet confidence and bright hope
concerning the future. Moreover, a distinct era was beginning to dawn — an
era characterized by a general awakening of the educational consciousness. It
was becoming manifest in the more generous provision of our communities for
secondary education and the still larger legislative generosity to the state uni-
versities, as well as by the hitherto unprecedented contributions of the great
fortunes to private and denominational institutions.
Here was an opportunity, not for every man, but for the larger man who
might he providentially disclosed as fitted by special gifts and experiences to
meet the new demands. And not an opportunity for him alone, hut for him
in combination with all the forces which had been brought into being by the
past twenty-nine years and those which were latent in the hearts of a noble con-
stituency to which he might win new and strong coefficients.
The discovery was the Rev. Edward Holden (now D. D., LL. D.),
then professor in Beloit College and the right hand of President Eaton in all
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advances for which friends and means were to be found. Professor Holden
was born April 30, 1863, graduated from Beloit College, in 1888, and from
Princeton-Theological Seminary in 1891. He was recalled at once to his Alma
Mater and continued there until chosen president here. The election occurred
at a meeting of the board of trustees held in the First Presbyterian church on
July 27, 1899. He was unanimously elected and. being introduced to the
board, the record significantly says, he “cordially accepted the office, made some
appropriate and effective remarks and requested that he might be set im-
mediately at work.” Here was the man ready for the larger handling of en-
larging interests, one who could make way for his cause into the well-intrenched
counting-rooms of the men of large business affairs to persuade them that
their best-paying investments were to be found in man-making, as well as he
could enlist the large-hearted women of means in an enterprise less directly
philanthropic and emotional than the objects to which they had been accustomed
to contribute. Robust and vigorous in body ; acute and intense mentally ; strong
in the faith of the “glorious gospel of the blessed God,” and in that specific
faith which removes mountains and thoroughly convinced of the centrality and
vitality of religion in education; he was the man for the place as clearly as the
place was for the man. President Holden made it evident at once and since
that a man of strong will may be full of sympathy; that high ideals are com-
patible with unwearied patience in their realization, and that daring initiative
may be combined with unshrinking perseverance. Already acquainted with
the inner life of America's best colleges by personal inspection, he has added
a careful study of the best institutions of the mother country, and has kept
fully abreast with the demands of the modern college. Forcible in address and
in the style of all written documents, his propaganda pellets and pleas have the
effect of grape-shot and are like Luther’s words — “half battles.” Realizing
the opportunity at Wooster, he refused within his second year here the tend-
ered presidency of his own admirable Alma Mater and soon thereafter repeated
solicitations to another position of commanding importance. Replying that
“a man must get his work done,” right manfully has lie adhered to a task
which most men would have deserted under similar temptations. One of <mr
fellow-townsmen (editor Lemuel Jeffries) has written of him as the “up-to-
date president with brilliant ideas of a modern college;” as “possessing a
peculiarly magnetic personality which has won for him success as a master of
students” ; and as “certain to secure grand success for the University through
his wonderful zeal and energy.” More recently the editor of The Interior
(Nolan R. Best) has written of Wooster's president as “a man dominated by
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an intense, idealistic passion for the upbuilding of Christian education and
uniting therewith phenomenal gifts of business ability which had won the con-
fidence of the hardest headed sort of practical men.*’
Nor must it be supposed that President Holden’s entire energies are given
to the financial forwarding of the University. He finds constantly ways of
cultivating acquaintance with and impressing uplifting thought upon the stu-
dent body. The freshman class is entertained at his hospitable home as they
enter college life ; and the senior class is assembled for a final social benediction
from Doctor and Mrs. Holden, reinforced for this occasion by the faculty and
trustees. The president effectively presides in faculty meetings, taking part
in all that concerns the internal intellectual and disciplinary and religious life of
the University. He delivers from the pulpit the opening sermon of each term
as well as the baccalaureate discourse at the year's close. He conducts the
daily chapel exercises with brief, clear, impressive and strongly evangelical
expositions of scripture. On matriculation day, early in December of each
year, he delivers an earnest and helpful address to those finally enrolled. A
multitude of special cases demanding aid of various kinds command readily
his sympathy and help.
Under these circumstances, general and individual, success of a large pat-
tern might have been and was confidently predicted. But there arose, in addi-
tion, sjiecial exigencies which gave yet ampler field for the forces of the new
executive and excited all those latent in the University’s constituency and
powerfully aided to open the doors of access to generous interest and aid from
without. The narrative of the eleven years may be traced, mainly from the
records, in its main features, but. necessarily, many pleasing details of this
brilliant period must be omitted.
The inauguration took place on November 3. 1899. a day to be remem-
bered for the exceptionally violent weather without and the exceptionally
strong enthusiasm within. Trustees, faculty, alumni, students and many in-
vited guests, filled and overflowed the large auditorium (Methodist church).
From two o’clock to five close attention was given to a varied programme, en-
livened with music and punctured with student demonstrations of a very lively
sort. In the address of welcome the trustees, the faculty, the Alumni, the
students, other institutions, theological seminaries, the synod of Uhio and the
citizens of Wooster were all represented. It was to be expected that the dom-
inant ideas of the University’s life would appear at the fourth inauguration as
they had appeared (as we have seen) at the three preceding occasions. Mr.
Scovel said: “We are near the summit of things, therefore, in all we do today
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in the interest of an institution which is frankly Christian. * * * There is
no need more imperative in the world of education today than an ideal Christian
college. This institution does not pretend to have attained thereto, but it does
claim to have erected that standard and to be pressing toward it steadily. Fail
of it we may, in this and that particular, but lose sight of the idea we never will.
The methods of approach to that ideal, the various particulars of decision as to
what it may mean in this and that application of principle must be left to the
united wisdom of the students, faculty, trustees, patrons and synod, all of whom
have reason to hope for the guidance of the good spirit of God. * * *
Our great fundamental principle itself insures ultimate success, and this has
been accepted without reserve by the president-elect. It is therefore with pe-
culiar pleasure that I discharge the duty assigned to me and present the presi-
dent-elect to the president of the board of trustees for the administration of
the oath of office.”
The second president, in behalf of the board of trustees, of which he was
the presiding officer, impressively signalized the urgent demands of the times
upon all educational institutions and quoted the strong utterance of Dr. John
Robinson at a previous inauguration, with which our readers are already
familiar. “Such, my brother, was the ideal institution,” he then said, “in the
hearts and minds of its founders and fathers. It is well to keep this ideal ever
in the fore-front. For it is the plaster-cast that you and we are to endeavor to
reproduce in substantial and polished marble. We have no reason to be
ashamed of our backing. Presbyterianism is a mighty power for truth and
righteousness in the earth today. - * * * By some it is esteemed the most
potent force of Protestantism now existing.” Emphasizing the representative
feature of the Presbyterian system. Doctor Taylor was led to apply it thus:
“This institution is the creature and agency of the Presbyterian church of Ohio.
Of this church the synod annually elected is the representative. The synod,
in its turn, elects a board of trustees as its representatives. The trustees in
turn are empowered to select the faculty, including the president. * * *
Idle church of Ohio reposes faith in its synod: the synod reposes confidence in
the trustees ; they in turn, confide in the faculty and I may add it will be neces-
sary for the faculty to trust the students and have faith in them. This whole
system of trust, being mutual, works both ways. * * * And all must con-
fide in the great church, the mother of all, for sympathy, encouragement and
sufficient material aid to perfect machinery and equipment.” Then Doctor
Taylor eloquently impressed the “solemn weight of responsibility, solemn and
divine.” which rests upon the faculty and concentrates in the executive. “Bear-
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ing such a trust, you have a right to the confidence and support of all who are
interested in the University. And this you have at the outset. * * *
That your career in this office may prove most honorable and glorious, for the
welfare of men, the glory of God and the advancement of His kingdom is our
earnest prayer as we welcome you to this high sphere of duty.” Dr. S. J. Kirk-
wood, connected with the University from its opening, appropriately extended
the hearty greeting of the faculty, assured that the new executive was “in ac-
cord with the views that we. as a faculty, hold in regard to the purpose and
work of Wooster.” Dr. John C. Sharpe (principal of Blairstown, Pennsyl-
vania) extended the alumni welcome as coming in the time of the “most pros-
perous era known to any land since the dawn of civilization,” and “in the
golden age of education when the growth of interest in higher education is far
outstripping progress in any other human interest in our country. * * *
For this mighty work we pledge to you the loyalty of Wooster’s sons and
daughters doing valiant service in every worthy vocation and in every clime
throughout the whole world.” George A. Custer (1900) assured the new
president that the students believed in Wooster’s past and were more than
ever confident, now, of her future. On the basis of their observation and ex-
perience thus far they said : “You told 11s once you were on our side. We
are on your side. You may depend upon us to stand by you. You may con-
sider us henceforth your avowed friends. Let the compact of friendship be
signed and sealed, and it is our determination that our obligations be sacredly
kept.” Thus came to expression a bit of the true Wooster spirit which is
thoroughly characteristic of the whole forty years. Anything contrary has
only been a ripple on the water’s surface. The students have never subscribed
to the notion elsewhere current that there must be hostility between those whom
common pursuits and common aims should make the firmest friends. They
do sometimes sing: ‘‘There’ll be no faculty there.” but they don’t act as though
they believed it.
The brief address of Prof. Henry P. Smith (Lane Seminary) presented
half humorously the practical side of the college executive “whose ‘chair’
must be the office-chair, his department the art of begging and booming and
building.” And yet, he said, that “vital, virile character was the paramount
need of the Christian college,” and that the “religious influences of the college
determines the size of the delegation to the seminary.” He rejoiced that
Wooster “is and ever has been honest with souls as well as with minds, loyal
to truth and to Him who is the truth and courageously claiming that highest
scholarship is in no wise inconsistent with humblest discipleship.” Dr. Trum-
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bull Lee (of Cincinnati) gave the synod's welcome. Most appropriately he
emphasized the fact that Christian and secular education had come to the part-
ing of the ways. He maintained that “Christian religious thought must be
vitally articulated with all parts of a true educational system,” and that “this
can only be accomplished by means of schools not dominated by secular in-
fluences, but controlled by the church.” In eight distinct but succinct proposi-
tions Doctor Lee showed just what can be accomplished in the way of an ideal
Christian education by such institutions as Wooster. “The educational
climax,” he contended, “is to educate the conscience and the will. Conscience
and will must be influenced by a standard of right. That standard is found
in the word of God alone.” Eloquently he urged that “the church caring for
her children, careful of their culture, strange to all alien forms of education
that shut out of view her altars, her ordinances, and the hope and inspiration
of her gospel, the church providing institutions with sufficient equipment and
competent Christian instructors, is the church of the Firstborn, is the perma-
nent factor of an imperishable civilization that underlies all our progressive
steps into the future already dawning upon the world with latter day glory. ”
Jacob Frick extended the greeting of Wooster's citizens, claiming that “the
welfare of the University and that of our city are identical. * * * This
University is the distinguishing mark of our city. * * * We anticipate
with pleasure your wholesome influence and pledge you our sympathy and co-
operation.”
The inaugural address made kindly allusion to the past and expressed a
fine determination to maintain the same lines, but with broad views as to the
relations of usefulness which the University must maintain toward all pro-
fessions and all the needs of society. Relieving the University “always to
have been hospitable to the highest and best intellectual tendencies of the times
as judged from the standpoint of a progressive Christian scholarship;” he de-
clared it to be his purpose to “urge the most modern and practical methods of
imparting knowledge." He did not mean to lie dictator. “The source of
power in the University of Wooster is the synod of Ohio. To the synod be-
longs the elective power of the board of trustees.” That board “should con-
tain men of sound judgment in finance, men who represent the great business
interests of Ohio — also men of the broadest scholarship. * * * The
method of government in the University of Wooster insures, through the
synod, the spirit of fidelity to the standard of the Presbyterian church of
America. The synod aspires to serve the nation by training men for all the
callings of life to intellectual honesty and independence of mind, but it desires
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to provide a safeguard to all benefactors of the college against false systems
of thought being fostered and taught with its consent, in Wooster.” With
this declaration, so exactly correspondent to the original and oft-repeated utter-
ances of the University’s past, the president joined most judicious and winning
expositions of the relations he desired to maintain with the alumni, the stu-
dents and the citizens of Wooster. It was difficult to tell which of the many
applauded points of the afternoon elicited the greatest enthusiasm, but the two
which stand out in memory most vividly were these : The announcement of the
purpose of H. C. Frick to build a twenty-five thousand dollar library building;
and the grateful surprise awakened by President Eaton when in closing a re-
markable tribute to the new president he affixed to him on the spot, by the
authority of the board of trustees of Beloit College, the degree of Doctor of
Divinity, as ''an expression of their confidence and afTection.”
There followed upon this auspicious afternoon an inauguration banquet
rich in all the elements that could combine to make such an occasion significant
and contributory to an intelligent and lasting enthusiasm. ‘‘Three hundred
and sixty guests/’ it is recorded, “sat down to a feast of wit and wisdom which
continued from seven to eleven.” Reluctantly we must leave the contents of
these admirable addresses untouched, though the aggressiveness of Chicago was
so well represented in the breezy speech of William McSurely (’86) — now
Judge McSurely — and Charles Krichbaum's idealistic and poetic tendencies
found the spirit of Wooster and praised it, and though there was mingled wit
and wisdom in H. B. Work’s words and those of Miss Mary Eddy. President
Thwing (Western Reserve) voiced the good wishes of all Ohio colleges, and
all was closed by an admirable and arousing address (Dr. R. V. Hunter) full
of history and strong with statistics, on “The Church and College.” Again
we hear the echo of original purposes as the demand is urged that the denomi-
national colleges shall have a faculty of scholars, devotedly Christian, loyal to
their denomination but enjoying the “largest liberty consistent with the genius
of Christianity and the conviction of a denomination.”
Almost coincident with the erection of the Frick library (of which more
in another place) went forward such improvements in the main building as in-
creased its conveniences, changed the old tower-form and provided new recita-
tion rooms. The furrow for the foundation of the new chapel was drawn at
the close of commencement exercises in June, 1900, and the president’s vaca-
tion was spent in foreign travel, partly concerned with study of old-world
institutions of learning. The historical statement of former catalogues tracing
the synodical origin of the University is continued with slight alteration in
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subsequent issues. This first year witnesses also the substitution of a “scien-
tific” course for the former “literary” course, and the establishment of matricu-
lation-day. The minutes of the board of trustees bear testimony to the new
achievements and to the new hopes, enkindled by the “wisdom and labors'* of
the new president and pledge co-operation in his plans and policy for the “larger
life of the University" appreciating most cordially his “enthusiasm and conse-
cration.” His “liberal yet firm and prudent policy" and discipline are recog-
nized. The marked increase in enrollment is noted and the restoration of inter-
collegiate games is approved. The president’s home has been secured and a
favorable financial report is presented, the total assets being four hundred and
eighty thousand six hundred and fifteen dollars and seventy-three cents.
In connection with questions raised in 1897 and '98 concerning the exact
powers of the synod as owner and controller of the University, it was dis-
covered by that able lawyer and devout Christian, Thomas McDougall. of Cin-
cinnati. that no statute of Ohio legitimated the transfer of their trust to an
ecclesiastical body by the trustees of any institution of learning incorporated
under the general law of March, 18 33. Since the control of the synod, involv-
ing care and support, had been the root-idea of the University from the begin-
ning, it was necessary at once to remedy this technical irregularity strangely
unperceived for nearly thirty years — even when a special legislative act, ad-
mitting the election of alumni trustees had been passed by the General Assembly
at the instance of Wooster's board of trustees. Accordingly the board, in
November, 1899, adopted the following resolution presented by Dr. \Vm. Mc-
Kibbin, of Cincinnati : “That the board of trustees will cordially co-operate
with the committee of the synod of Ohio to obtain such legislation as will se-
cure the control contemplated in the charter of the University." This joint
effort to place the original relation upon a satisfactory legal basis obtained its
desired result in the passing by the Legislature in April, T900, of “A11 Act to
Supplement Section 3751 of the Revised Statutes." The subject was brought
again to the board's attention at the February meeting of 1901 in a paper by
Doctor McKibbin and another by Doctor Hills of Wooster. Both papers were
referred to a committee to report at the June meeting of that year. Order was
then taken. Doctor McKibbin submitted “Amended Articles, or Certificate
of Incorporation of the University of Wooster, accepting the provisions of the
act of General Assembly passed April, 1900 (94 C). L., pp. 331 and 332), and
known as sections 3731/? and 3731c of the Revised Statutes of Ohio. The
articles were unanimously accepted and a copy was ordered to be sent to the
synod “for its acceptance of the powers proposed to be conferred upon it." The
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synod accepted, of course. The essential part of the whole transaction may
lie most clearly apprehended by citing the action of the board of trustees. After
reciting in full the provisions of the original charter which provided for the
election of trustees by the synods to replace the incorporators (who were to
serve only until November i, 1867) which also declared that “the said Univer-
sity shall be under the care of said three synods/' the board continues :
“Whereas, The University of Wooster, incorporated as aforesaid, desires to
avail itself of the provisions of an act of the General Assembly of the state of
Ohio, passed April 16, 1900 (94 O. L., pp. 331 and 332), and known as sec-
tions 375 16 and 3751c of the Revised Statutes of Ohio, as a part of its articles
or certificate of incorporation ; now
• “Therefore, Be it resolved by the board of trustees of the University of
Wooster, located in the city of Wooster, Wayne county, Ohio as follows :
“1. That said the University of Wooster accept the provisions of sec-
tions 3757a of the Revised Statutes of Ohio and confer on and grant to the
synod of Ohio in connection with the general assembly of the Presbyterian
church in the United States of America the care of and control over said Uni-
versity and the right to appoint thirty trustees in classes as heretofore, and of
whom at least seven shall be resident freeholders of said Wayne county, Ohio,
and of whom three-fourths shall be communicant members of the Presbyterian
church in the United States of America, and not more than five of whom may
be non-residents of the State of Ohio; six of whom shall be nominated in
classes as heretofore, by and from the alumni of said University as provided
by section 37510 of the Revised Statutes of Ohio, and the residue shall be
nominated bv the board of trustees of said University; and the right to ap-
point such additional number of trustees as said synod may from time to
time deem necessary for the best interest of said University upon certifying
its action to said board, and upon nomination by the board as aforesaid ; and
the further right, in the event of the rejection by said synod of any or all nom-
inations of the said board of trustees, on its own motion to elect a trustee or
trustees, to fill the vacancy or vacancies for which nominations were made by
the said board of trustees.
“2. That said University confer on and grant to said synod the right to
protect the property and funds of said University, in the event of the misuse
or division of said property or funds by the board of trustees, or other person
representing said board, in such legal manner and in the name of such person
or corporation as said synod may direct by resolution, certified by its clerk, to
any civil court, having jurisdiction over said University/'
(32)
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This action, now of record in the office of the secretary of state, so thor-
oughly thought out and so well-grounded in its historic foundation, would seem
to have been another of the fortunate happenings in Wooster’s history. Arising
in a question of doubt, it settled everything to the complete satisfaction of all
concerned. It clinched the nail already driven home by many declarations of
the thirty past years and made absolute that “guarantee** so strongly insisted
on by the first president, Doctor Lord, and so repeatedly mentioned by that in-
defatigable and wise first president of the board of trustees. Dr. John Robin-
son, and so constantly referred to in the catalogues. It seemed especially timely
at the dawning of the new day of prosperity and expansion which had come
to the University with the new administration.
The financial report of June, 1901, shows an increase of contributions from
churches and individuals and almost the whole amount needed for the hand-
some Memorial chapel in hand. Newly adopted rules are commended by the
board. New buildings for science-extension are hoped for. A school of
oratory is projected and schemes to meet enlarged expenses are discussed.
The spirit of hopefulness has bloomed into confidence and larger things are
expected.
But the enlargements came through previous destructions — a not unfa-
miliar way of divine providence in producing the greater changes in human
affairs. The fire of December 11, 1901, still a mystery as to its proximate
cause, seems to have unfolded into a clear design to permit an apparent (and
in some sense a real) calamity to become the open door into the coveted and
expected larger life. The story of the loss may have its aspects of touching
reminiscence, but the more important story is that of instant recovery from
momentary depression ; the development of almost unsuspected breadth and
depth of attachment to the University; the rising to the occasion of President
Holden, carrying with him all the discouraged ones by his resourceful energy ;
the co-operation of many warm hearts and willing hands ; the actual self-de-
nials of many ; the readiness with which aid from the outside met the great need
and stimulated the inner and the innermost circle to greater effort and resistless
enthusiasm. The story has been told, perhaps best told, by Professor Compton
in a special number of the Wayne County Democrat issued in December, 1902,
in connection with the dedication of the new buildings. The ruins were still
smoking when we held the gymnasium meeting at ten A. M. of December 12th,
when Doctor Hills eloquently reminded us that as the corner-stones had come
through the fiery furnace uninjured and were “still there,** so the old prin-
ciples and purposes of the University were the guarantee of success. If built
upon again as foundations we could not fail. The evening meeting called by
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the city’s Board of Trade and enthused by the presence and courage of Presi-
dent Holden who had been out of the city the previous night but had sent a
heart-rousing telegram early in the day, proved how impossible it was to bum
the University out of the hearts of Wooster’s citizens. The people determined
that, aided by the insurance-money (only sixty thousand dollars unfortu-
nately), they would rebuild that which had been the nucleus of the whole
enterprise in 1866. James Mullins put the heavy burden in motion by a sub-
scription of five thousand dollars and was followed by his son Walter in a
subscription of one thousand dollars, who was followed in turn by Mr. and
Mrs. John McSweeney with one thousand dollars and these added to Mr.
and Mrs. Jacob Frick’s one thousand dollars and many smaller sums carried
the amount to within about fifteen thousand dollars of the supposedly necessary
forty thousand dollars. The subsequent ten days were scenes of ingenious
division of labor among classes and alumni and citizens within and county
men without and such responses were met as made certain a rehabilitation of
the University, yet the size and style and proportion of that rehabilitation
Were still uncertain. But that uncertainty disappeared when the challenging
gift of Andrew Carnegie — the one hundred thousand dollars on condition of
two more within sixty days — followed by Louis H. Severance's pledge of a
fifty thousand dollar science building (ultimately costing him seventy-five
thousand) came to our knowledge. Now everybody hastened to have part in
what was to be an assured magnificent advance. We all resolved that condi-
tions should be met without fail. From far-off mission fields came donations
redolent of affectionate self-denial. It was the writer’s privilege to receive
eight such contributions. But enough ; let us use Professor Compton’s closing
paragraphs. “The gifts came in so rapidly in the last few days that the inde-
fatigable treasurer, Jesse McClellan, to whom large credit is due for the suc-
cess of the canvass, could only record, not add. * * * There were more
than five thousand givers. The crisis was momentous, the victory glorious.
It was a dramatic chapter. December 11, 1901, the fire; December 22, the
electrifying offer; February 21, 1902, nearly four hundred thousand dollars
raised and the ever memorable jubilee. December 11, 1902, the dedication of
the new buildings and the realization of the New Wooster. It is too much to
ascribe to man alone. God’s hand is in it.” The names of the citizens’ com-
mittee should find a place in this permanent record: Walter D. Foss (chair-
man), Louis E. Holden, L. P. Ohliger, F. W. Miller, W. J. Mullins, I. N.
Kinney, C. M. Gray, Albert Dix, George J. Swartz, J. S. E. Overholt, Robert
C. Taylor, R. D. Firestone, A. Cunningham. David Myers, Prof. J. H. Dicka-
son, Prof. J. O. Notestein, D. S. Firestone, David Nice. Will Long, John F.
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Barrett. The board of trustees, present at the dedication of Memorial chapel,
passed the most appreciative resolutions, gratefully mentioning all classes of
those who had helped the great consummation. The exercises of dedication
on December n, 1902, though much was still unfinished, were accompanied
with genuine enthusiasm. President Moffatt incited our zeal bv the assertion
that “Presbyterian institutions have allowed themselves to be crowded back
until today they occupy not the first but the fourth place in denominational
schools. Presbyterians have not sustained what the fathers founded a century
ago/’ Dr. S. S. Palmer, president of the board, in presenting the keys to
the moderator of synod, reminded him of the increased responsibility which
would devolve upon the synod in the maintenance of the larger university, as
it accepted these buildings. That moderator (Dr. R. J. Thompson, of Lima,
Ohio) emphasized the union of synod and university, and declared : “There
is no stronger friend of education than the Presbyterian church.” and the
“Presbyterians of Ohio have finally realized what they have in the Lhiiversity
of Wooster.” The city was gay with decorations and full descriptions of the
various buildings were published. The “white city on the hill’’ has attracted
many descriptive pens, but none more intelligently appreciative than that of
the Interior's editor — the well-known Christian layman, Nolan R. Best — in a
sketch recently published in that widely-read journal : “Although people of a
philosophic turn of mind are always ready to warn one against attributing
perfection to anything mundane, it is impossible to suppress the instinct to
call the Wooster college buildings perfect. What could be thought of that
they want. The architecture is an example beyond criticism of that style
which the world of art has agreed to set aside for the use of higher learning —
the English collegiate Gothic — expressed as purely in each unit as it is har-
moniously in the group. The buildings have been planned with such foresight
of the particular uses for which each is designed that no convenience is missed,
no necessity left unprovided for. Heating, lighting, ventilating and water-
supply are taken care of in the latest methods known to practical science and
all are supplied from the university’s own powerhouse, which alone would
win the university the admiration of any observer who appreciates the mechan-
ical beauties of high-class machinery. But to patrons and students far more
important is the generous modern equipment of the buildings. * * *
Nothing is extravagant or pretentious, but there is absolutely no stint of ap-
paratus. Everything that a teacher of undergraduates can need is there.
* * * To prepare young men for engineering there is a full working outfit
of dynamos, motors, engines and electrical apparatus for the student’s experi-
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mentation. So in the biological building, the young man preparing for medi-
cine will find there the best microscopes and a vast variety of slides for ad-
vanced work in anatomy and physiology. The library facilities are also of the
most liberal. * * * In every way Wooster has put itself beyond the neces-
sity of apologies for what it affords the young men and women under its care.”
But it must not be supposed that the new administration found it all plain
sailing after the buildings were completed. Then, indeed, came the struggle to
meet inevitable deficits which always follow such extensions. President Porter
many years ago begged the alumni of Yale to remember that whoever gave
a new building and did not provide for the care and expense it entailed laid a
new burden upon the management. It was not an easy thing to convince even
the newly aroused generosity of Wooster’s friends that a much greater endow-
ment was needed to meet the budget entailed by the multiform facilities and the
increasing faculty. It had to be explained that even a larger enrollment of
students meant a larger expenditure, instead of creating a fund for other ex-
penses. More books in the library and more apparatus in the laboratories
and more privileges of all sorts for the student-use of all the advantages
offered meant more income, or larger deficits. The situation became accented
when the president reported in February of 1903 that the deficits of two years
would amount to nearly forty thousand dollars, all of which ought to be in
hand, if possible by the following June. Since the dedication in December,
1902, only five thousand three hundred dollars had been raised to meet this
sum and five thousand dollars of that had come from one ever-generous friend
of the university. In May a special board meeting was held and more ag-
gressive efforts and appeals resolved upon. In June an improved situation, but
twenty thousand dollars still to be raised and that in short order to secure two
conditional pledges of five thousand dollars each. Special appeal was to be
made to the synod in view of the “quickened spirit of the Presbyterian church
in behalf of her schools of higher learning which found expression in the last
general assembly.” It was to be urged that the time had come “for binding
this university more closely to the hearts and purse of the Presbyterians of
Ohio.” since “the university is the synod’s educational creation, subject to its
ownership and control and entitled to its abiding interest and its generous
benefactions.” The elaborate scheme resolved upon seems to have largely
succeeded, and while there is some subsequent borrowing the effort was seri-
ously considered early in 1904 to raise the endowment to one million dollars.
President Holden thought it could be done, but would require many workers
in the field and several years of labor.
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During these current years and on there were the constant evidences of
the highest success in the internal life of the university. Without important
exception, the annual reports show increased enrollment, departments better
manned, excellent steadiness in the student-body, an encouraging general re-
ligious life and constant annual quotas of those who were constrained by love
of the Master to undertake his service at home and abroad. Library facilities
were increased. Here and there a salary was raised, always within the sacred
limit of one thousand five hundred dollars however, and the generous custom
of the Sabbatic year was begun with the senior Prof. J. O. Notestein.
In 1906 the often-mentioned additional accommodations for the young
women of the university Was taken up in earnest. The cost was to be fifty
thousand dollars, but the investigating tours, in which Doctor Holden visited
the leading women’s colleges of the country, changed the estimates. In the
end the palatial building cost one hundred and ten thousand dollars, something
more than half of which was the contribution of Louis H. Severance, who in-
sisted that it should be called Holden Hall. Thus another angle was reached
and passed on the toilful acclivity of the university’s upward movement.
But the pressure for more endowment came now to be considered as im-
perative. The budget of 1906-7 had been put down as eighty-one thousand four
hundred and ninety-six dollars. That of 1907-8 was to lie seventy-eight
thousand six hundred thirty-six dollars and seventv-tvvo dollars plus the first
installment of the paving assessment. Deficits up to June, 1907, amounted to
eighteen thousand one hundred and sixty-eight dollars and forty-seven cents.
Courageously this burden was shouldered by the indomitable president, aided
and abetted by faithful and laborious field-agents and stimulated by the good
wishes of the growing multitude of Wooster’s friends. The general educa-
tion board, administering Mr. Rockefeller’s bounty, thought it worth while to
help an institution which had more than doubled its assets in five or six years —
they had reached nearly one million and a quarter — and initiated the effort to
raise five hundred thousand dollars by April 1, 1908, by a subscription of one
hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars conditioned upon the whole amount
by the date just mentioned and the extinguishment of all debt. Louis H.
Severance added a like sum with similar conditions and Andrew Carnegie
followed with fifty thousand dollars. Here then was an open way to the half
million of fresh endowment if the two hundred eighteen thousand one hundred
and sixty-eight dollars and forty-seven cents could be brought together. And
this must necessarily be a harder task than the four hundred and twenty thous-
and dollars of the rebuilding fund. There were no such commanding and
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heart-reaching circumstances. It was no longer life and death, but only life
and a larger life. Besides, everybody had given over and over again and
many quite recently, and the close of 1907 was wintry in the financial skies.
But there could be no postponement and no relaxation of conditions. Since,
then, it must be done, ways and means were found to do it. Again there was
division of labor and responses from many quarters. Such an opportunity
could not be lost. With much painstaking the triumph of the first trial was
repeated and the completion of the subscription announced. Then another
jubilee and a red-letter day was added to the Wooster calendar — March 31,
1908.
Throughout these recent efforts constant reference has been had to the
“forward movement*’ of the synod of Ohio, responding to the enthusiastic
call of the general assembly uttered in 1903. The objective point of that stir-
ring summons was twelve million dollars to be raised by the entire denomina-
tion “for the purpose of endowment of our Presbyterian colleges in the sev-
eral states” Of this movement the board’s report to synod in 1909 says:
“Ohio’s quota of that amount is one million two hundred thousand dollars.
As goes Ohio so goes the country. The synod determined to do its full share
— ten dollars per member. Thus far the effort has been a magnificent success.
* * *■ It is with the deepest appreciation and gratitude that we acknowl-
edge the earnest effort and large generosity of the entire Presbyterian church,
and the friends of Christian education, to the extent of six hundred seventy-
seven thousand five hundred and seven dollars and nineteen cents toward the
million dollars of the new endowment, leaving but three hundred twenty-two
thousand four hundred and two dollars and eighty-one cents to complete what
you began in the synod of 1903.”
The forward sweep of the university’s financial progress becomes brilliant-
ly visible in the following luminous statement :
The total assets of the University of Wooster May 31, 1899, were
$452,551.87. Of this amount, $181,737.42 was credited to endowment. At
the time of the fire December 11, 1901, the total assets were reduced by the
loss of the main building and its wings $184,174.00. The university received
$60,000 insurance on its loss. Crediting this amount, the total assets would
stand December 12, 1901. the day after the fire, as $328,377.87. This may
rightfully be said to be the financial foundation on which the present adminis-
tration had to build, although in tin’s amount the first half of the Library and
the new Chapel are included.
At the close of business March 31, 1910, we had $755,368.52 in general
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and special endowment ; also outstanding pledges and annuities, which when
paid will be credited for endowment, amounting to $229,911.11. If all these
prove to be good we might say that we have $985,279.63 in line for the en-
dowment. We have in addition to this our present plant ; land, building and
equipment, which amount on our books to $871,970.20, or total assets of
$1,857,249.83.
But, as Doctor Cause (first secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Aid
for Colleges) was accustomed to say: “Nothing is so hungry as a college.”
When current income and current expenditure had been, for the first time in
the university history, equalized, the need of further development in various
directions was perceived to be imperative. The largest of all the plans was
projected and an efifort has been commenced to provide for a largely increased
endowment and for at least two buildings — a dormitory for men and a much
desired gymnasium with a possible chapel-extension, according to original
plans, to make yet more attractive and effective the work of the Christian
Associations of men and women. John R. Mott reports a friend ready to give
two thousand dollars to commence this enterprise. No less an amount than
six hundred thousand dollars is considered adequate to meet these needs. Of
that sum the first three hundred thousand dollars has been subscribed — one-half
by the general education board and the other by a friend of the university whose
personality is as yet kept in reserve. The active canvass now in progress has
secured up to this present writing (September 1st) three hundred and ninety-
six thousand dollars — leaving two hundred and four thousand dollars to be
sought for. The conditions are completion by the closing day of the current
year ( 1910) and the extinguishment of all indebtedness. There will doubtless
be another jubilee and another red-letter day in Wooster’s calendar. Along
with other enlargements, the university’s campus has grown to dimensions
which provide for the certain and undoubtedly rapid development of the future.
From the original twenty acres the campus has now extended to a total area
of sixty-three acres. Part of this is a recent addition separated by only a
street’s breadth from the main block — a most timely addendum as pre-empting
what would have proven inaccessible within a very few years.
The constant increase of students during the present administration has
kept pace with other phases of progress. During T907~’o8 the total enroll-
ment without the summer-school students was seven hundred and thirty-three :
with them, one thousand six hundred and twenty-one. For I9o8-’gq. the total
reached eight hundred and twelve without the summer-school roll : with it.
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there were one thousand eight hundred and one. The largest freshman class
in the university’s experience — one hundred and sixty — came in the year just
closed.
This growth has been accompanied by a gradual increase of the faculty
until it now numbers, counting instructors and adjunct-professors, thirty-eight.
The new department of history, long desired, opens with the college year just
before us ( 1910-11).
An important change in the charter has been under consideration for more
than a year. It contemplates the relinquishment by the synod of Ohio of the
right to elect the trustees of the university, thus surrendering all control of
the institution. The moving consideration for this change is the desire to
acquire for the institution the benefits of the pension-fund of the Carnegie
foundation. The matter was presented by the board of trustees to the synod
at its meeting in October, 1909. A postponement until the meeting of 1910
was agreed upon. Meanwhile a careful study of the subject was to be made
by a committee which will report at the approaching meeting.
The remarkable success of Wooster's president for the decade past has
drawn upon him the atention of those who constitute the Board of Aid for
Colleges in the denomination as a whole. Three or more times they have
sought his services as secretary. The last attempt was but a few months ago,
and the following resolution was unanimously passed by the board of trustees:
"‘The flattering offer * * * only accentuates the esteem and affection in
which the board of trustees holds President Holden. It is the sense of this
board that the services of President Holden for the present and for years to
come are indispensable to the progress and development of the university of
Wooster and that it would therefore be a calamity to the institution at this
time to subtract from it his forceful personality. In saying this we have all
the while in mind President Holden's good, together with the prosperity and
destiny of the university which must be forever associated with his name, and
which will remain a monument to his unselfish devotion and labor, for it is
seldom given to one man to accomplish so much in eleven short years as the
noble work he has accomplished during his administration.
‘‘We are not unmindful that his services as associate-secretary would
open great avenues for usefulness. Nevertheless the work to be done by Doc-
tor Holden here must necessarily bring him in close and affectionate relations
with young men and women which are in the highest sense personal and that
personal relations and affectionate regard are the highest earthly rewards.
“The board therefore respectfully asks President Holden to remain with
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the University of Wooster and prays God that he may be permitted to give
many years to the work to which he seems to have been divinely called.” At
the recent commencement the constant expressions of undisguised satisfaction
on the part of all concerned for the welfare of the university — faculty, alumni,
patrons, students and citizens — furnished ample evidence that the affectionate
respect and devout wishes of the board of trustees awakened loyal echoes in
all hearts.
VI. THE FACULTY.
Now that the governing principles of the University have been discovered
and described and the chronicle of events has been brought down to date,
there remain many aspects of this multiform life which are best understood
and estimated when treated separately. They vary, of course, in relative im-
portance, but no one of them can be fairly omitted. And precisely for that
reason each must be dealt with as briefly as may be at all consistent with the
purposes of this historical sketch.
Faculty changes have been many, naturally, and it is impossible, though
the material is at hand, to give even the names, dates, antecedents and char-
acteristics of so large a number. The inner history of the teaching body has
been, what it might have been expected to be for a body of men gathered to
practice such definite principles for so noble an end, one of great harmony.
Personal animosities have been unknown. Differences in religious convictions
have led to but one resignation. Changes for inadequacy have been very few.
Those who have gone to other fields of usefulness have entered upon them
with warm commendations from the body they left. Many names are starred
thus in the records, of which mention can be made only of two. Dr. Edgar W.
Work, of New York, and Prof. Dr. James Wallace, of Macalester College.
Some have been added to the faculty in later years who have received the
warmest and most appreciative welcome, but none have seemed more worthy
or competent than Wooster’s own product, such as Notestein, who is the glory
of our teaching force, and that ideal dean — Compton. Lecturers who gave
their services gratuitously were Judge Welker (United States court), the Rev.
Dr. Jeffers (while professor at Western Theological Seminary) and Prof.
John De Witt (while at Lane Seminary). The first faculty has been frequent-
ly described and the pen of the present writer would be ready enough in linger-
ing over their gifts and graces, since it has been his privilege to have personally
known them all in one or another relation of life. But space forbids except to
mention the exceptional ability as teacher and author of Dr. C. S. Gregory,
whose forcefulness and analytic talent can never be forgotten and whose bow
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yet abides in strength as a brave defender of that faith in God’s word, “once
delivered to the saints.” There must also be recorded the appreciative testi-
monial of the board of trustees as Dr. Willis Lord sundered his connection
with that body : “We can never forget that he came to us at a critical period
in our history, — when, in fact, our history was yet to be made. We were not
insensible then, nor have we become so, to the risks attendant upon the as-
sumption of the position to which we ventured to summon him. That the
University has passed these perils so successfully wTe feel is largely due to the
wisdom, skill and fidelity of its first president. We would have been thank-
ful if the students, so strongly and rightly attached to him, could have further
enjoyed his counsels, sympathy and instruction. * * * Associated as his
name must ever be with the infancy of the Lhiiversity. we know that Dr. Lord
will always be interested in its prosperity. ”
For those who have “ fallen upon sleep” while still members of the faculty
there must be reserved an assured place in the grateful memories of their suc-
cessors. In every case they were held in highest esteem by the people of the
city and county as well as by the University community. They had obtained
this testimony, that they pleased most those who knew them best.
The first of those whose ‘‘hands were laid to the plow, but, behold! it was
a palm,” \vas Miss Annie B. Irish, Ph. D. She possessed rare gifts and had
enjoyed some unusual advantages. The board of trustees entered this record :
“The death of Miss Annie B. Irish has touched our hearts with profound sor-
row as a personal bereavement. By her lovely and symmetrical Christian
character, her remarkably able management of her department and her faithful
and efficient work as a Christian among the students, she had won our warm-
est admiration and love. Counting by years, her life was short; counting by
work done and results achieved, it was longer than that of many who have
attained to threescore and ten years.” Miss Irish died February 12. i88r>.
Her portrait was presented to Hoover Cottage, June 6, T889, and memorials
of her winning character and elevating influence were read by ladies repre-
senting the Woman’s Advisory Board.
The whole community shared in the grief of the University circle when
Karl Merz, Mus. D., the founder of our musical department, was taken from
us. His death occurred in January, 1890. The following testimonial was
published soon after: “A man of remarkable abilities and diversified gifts, de-
veloped by unremitting application, he mastered and enriched the science and
art of music in its composition and literature, and gained a more than national
reputation.
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“As exemplary and great-hearted as he was industrious and efficient, he
had by eight years of unceasing kindness won an exceptional place in the con-
fidence and warmest affections of the whole community.
“He was attached to his associates in the faculty, invariably found on the
side of just authority and thoroughly loyal to the ideal of the institution.
“A fervent and intelligent religious faith both underlaid and crowned his
life. It is hoped that the department he adorned and toiled for may ever bear
testimony in its future development to the gifts and character and faith of its
founder. "
The close of the same year (December 22, 1890) witnessed the removal
of Dr. James Black, D.D., LL.D., from the work to which a long and fruitful
life had been devoted. The records of the board of trustees show how pro-
foundly the fifteen years of his professorship (Greek and English) had
wrought themselves into the University's life. The board emphasizes its esti-
mate of “his superior intellectual capabilities, his high literary qualifications
for the position he occupied and his unexcelled genius as a teacher. * * *
Above all they would bear testimony to the unfaltering strength of his religious
convictions, and the power of his spiritual life as displayed in the class-room
* * * and in all social contact with his fellow men. The pervading pres-
ence of his gentle piety was like the sweet scent of a field the Lord hath blessed.
He was loyal to duty in every thought, faithful in every service, exemplary
in word and act, overflowing with loving kindness to every man and every crea-
ture. His Christian consistency was never questioned while the influence of
his noble character impressed every soul that drew within the magic circle of
his consecration." When this minute was read on the following Commence-
ment Day “the whole audience reverently rose and remained standing in ex-
pression of their concurrence in the sentiments of the resolution/’
Dr. O. X. Stoddard, LL.D., was a member of the first faculty and al-
ready well known as a professor of natural science when Wooster's doors were
opened. He became emeritus in 1883, though continuing lectures to the senior
class, and died February 10, 1892. The board of trustees recorded that he
“was a striking exemplification of the saying: ‘To be is to teach.' He taught
by what he was as well as by spoken or written word. * * * He was a
Christian man of science. To him the heavens and earth and all things therein
declared the glory of God. * * * He had a high and chivalrous sense of
honor — a Christian gentleman without fear and without reproach. * * *
Hundreds of men and women in this and other lands hold him in grateful
remembrance as a man and as a teacher and will perpetuate his influence in
ever widening circles."
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Another testimonial describes him thus : “A wise man and length of days
were in wisdom's hand for him. A student of nature's mysteries and re-
warded by her sympathy. An artificer in all substances to express all forces.
A careful student of mind finding its impress and majesty everywhere super-
ior to matter. A master in morals, public and private, teaching the noblest
type of citizenship and illustrating it in a life devoted to a large and intelligent
patriotism.’' Doctor Stoddard possessed mechanical genius and some ap-
paratus made with his own hands is still in use in our laboratories.
Nearly a decade passed before Prof. S. J. Kirkwood, Ph. D., LL. D.
(mathematics and astronomy), passed away. He, too, had been a member of
the original faculty and one of those who brought an already established repu-
tation to the service of the institution. With one exception (Notestein), his
life as a professor projects the longest line of active service. Coming in
1870, he gave up his work only with his life on June 24, 1901. The observa-
tory is the monument of his extra-professorial industry. He delivered most
of the lectures and solicited much of the funds which made such an equipment
so early in the University's history possible. An admiring friend has pro-
vided ten thousand dollars as a partial endowment for a professorship of
astronomy which shall perpetuate Doctor Kirkwood's name and memory in
connection with that in which the Professor's preferences were pronounced
and on which he had made great progress in preparing a text-book. Doctor
Kirkwood's interests in students was such as to commend their entire con-
fidence and attract their affectionate regard. He loved to teach the import-
ance of character, — that sum of the moral attributes in which Kant found the
value of human personality outweighing all the stars. He counseled every-
thing which would satisfy the preferences of the student-body and be at the
same time consistent with a conscientious regard to the sacred trust as to their
welfare reposed in the University's governing body. He refused other posi-
tions of honor and profit to abide with the interests he had done so much to
build up. The memory of his personal Christian influence will long be cher-
ished by Wooster's alumni and alumnae, along with their sense of indebtedness
for the mental vigor and positive knowledge his clear and skillful instruction
in the mazes of mathematics brought them.
Director Byron J. Oliver had taken charge of the department of music,
in 1893. when his highly esteemed and most competent predecessor. D. F.
Conrad (one of Karl Merz's pupils), had gone abroad for a second term of
foreign study. Mr. Oliver soon proved himself thoroughly furnished for
every good work in piano, organ and theory, as Well as in the capacity of con-
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ductor. In a continuous service of nearly twelve years (interrupted only bv
one year of organ-specializing in Berlin) he grew into a place of confidence
and personal influence only second to that of the founder of the department,
while probably excelling the latter in matters of teaching — technique. He
died, after brief illness, January 29, 1905. Director Oliver began his life's
work as a teacher under the admirable school-policy of Canada, his native land.
Not until he had reached maturity did he give himself to music and therein
he profited above many who made an earlier consecration. He was a thorough
teacher, an inspiring conductor, and an excellent manager. Very early in his
youth he had professed his faith in Christ and made it evident always that
Christian principle sustained every purpose he formed. He knew the best
in sacred as well as in secular music and conducted every church-service with
profound reverence and true feeling. He carried forward the work of the
department in the spirit in which it was commenced. The memorial window
in the chapel but faintly expresses the abiding esteem and affection of which he
is still the object in our entire community.
The last of our co-laborers to fall beside his work was Prof. William H.
Wilson (mathematics and astronomy). Wooster was his Alma Mater (class
of ‘89) and never had she a more loyal son or one more thoroughly apprecia-
tive of her original ideals. He became at once a teacher in his chosen line of
study and proved his competence from the beginning. Advanced to a pro-
fessorship in that excellent institution, Geneva College, and supplementing his
natural gifts by graduate study, and privileged to take part in observation of
an eclipse, he demonstrated originality i\\ research as well as efficiency in
teaching. By nature he was accurate. It was part of his remarkably sym-
metrical and steadfast character. If ever a fine life was indicated by a fault-
less youth, it was true in Professor Wilson’s case. The boy was father to the
man. The young man was the index of the maturity which had just been
reached, in its fullest sense, when he was called away from earth. It was a
great gratification to him to be selected to succeed his former instructor ; and
he brought all his ingenuity and exact methods, as well as all his strong per-
sonal power as a manly Christian, to the service of the institution he loved.
His life throughout was transparently sincere, and probably no member of
the entire faculty ever obtained at as early a period of professional experience
so wide and deep an influence among the students. He became specially effec-
tive in sustaining high ideals in athletics. While insisting upon ball-playing
of a high grade he mightily convinced the players that the obligation to be
Christian gentlemen in fair-play and courtesy was to lie lield as first and funda-
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mental in every arena. He died in June, 1907, and the wound in our hearts
is still unhealed despite the comfort we have in a successor (Professor Gable)
of like competence and character.
Concerning the contemporary faculty, it must be recorded that they repre-
sent in more than thirty personalities many of the best educational centres of
our own' land and, by graduate study, of other lands. So many members
have been connected with the university so long that unity of life and opinion
and a continuity in development has been aided. Some of those longest here
remain most effective in service. Others are bringing new contributions
through experience of life in the later developed condition of the larger univer-
sities at home and abroad. In 1901 seven additions were made. The latest
are Dr. Oscar F. Wisner (Wooster ’81), formerly president of the Christian
College in Canton, China, who has taken the chair of missions. Mr. Delbert
G. Lean, who enters with great acceptance upon his work in the department
of oratory; Robert Granville Caldwell (Wooster ’04), who comes to the de-
partment of history after experience in India and in Huron College; and
Professor Meyer, who comes from Bethany College, West Virginia, to be
assistant in Greek, Latin and German.
Leave of absence had occasionally been granted for considerable periods
of foreign study before 1906. But then the administration felt strong enough
to provide the appropriation for a substitute, which permitted a professor to
use his salary for a year in furthering his preparation for subsequent work.
The custom is an expensive one, but marks a great step in advance by giving
established men the coveted opportunity for wider observation and research.
It began appropriately with the senior Professor — Notestein. The present
writer followed in 1907-8. Dean Compton succeeded, then the privilege fell
to Professor Bennett (chemistry) and just now Prof. John G. Black (math-
ematics and geology) is enjoying it.
During all these years many assistants in various departments have been
employed and this has proven to be an exceedingly helpful method of providing
men trained for competence as professors in other institutions and for tempor-
ary assistance in the absence of members of our own faculty.
The secretary of the faculty is designated from time to time and he is
usually chosen from among the more recent additions to that body.
This office was formerly accompanied by responsibility for the work of
the registrar. But increasing members and the necessity for ascertaining the
propriety of receiving certificates from schools of all grades, together with the
demand for accuracy in the record of each student’s work (and this accented
by the fire-loss of previous records) have resulted in a registrar (Lester H.
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Wolfe) whose whole time is given to these varied uses. No office could have
proved a greater convenience at many points in the university's life and no
officer could have more speedily brought the entire force, educational and
administrative, into obligation for his intelligent and ready aid. Professor
Notestein bore the burden of most of these duties for many years and as usual
“nec tetigit quid non ornavit.” He devised the scheme used before the fire.
Then came Professor Behoteguy’s tenure of the office, but his careful work
was reduced to ashes. Now thoroughly organized in a series of standing
committees, with a system of careful observation of what transpires in our
secondary schools and in our greater universities, and re-enforced bv the ob-
servations of some member whose sabbatic year may be spent in educational
centres of the old world, we may consider Wooster’s enlarged and enlarging
faculty as worthy the confidence of its constituency.
VII. THE TRUSTEES.
It was the good fortune of the present writer in coming to Wooster
f 1883) to know some members of the original board of trustees. And in the
study of the institution’s life I have been additionally impressed with their
supreme earnestness, their strong faith, their vision and their prevision. Many
of them continued to bear the heat and burden of the day for many years after
the doors were successfully opened in 1870. The first loans were made by
the trustees themselves, in order to meet exigencies. They held many meet-
ings and canvassed many plans. Two of them I had known during my boy-
hood in Indiana — the Rev. L. I. Drake and Dr. W. W. Colmery. They were
all self-sacrificing and ingenious in devising methods to meet the demands of
each year. Of the whole number but one survives — David Robison, Jr., of
Toledo. He represented the synod of Columbus from 1866 to 1877 and the
synod of Toledo, from 1877 to 1883. Long a resident of Wooster, he is still
interested in the city and its welfare. The board was largely composed of
ministers, as befitted the existing circumstances. It is now made up largely
of laymen from the ranks of business and professional life. It is impossible,
though it could not fail to be interesting, to print a full list with any such com-
ments as the roster would deserve. A high degree of faithfulness to their
trust, often at great personal inconvenience, was characteristic of them all.
Lucas Flattery resigned in 1882 and a minute of appreciation and regret
was entered. Peter Foust was elected in 1883 and died in June, 1901. The
board recognized his seventeen years of service. “Quiet and unobtrusive in
disposition, he yet exhibited an unflagging interest in the university by a uni-
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formerly faithful attendance upon the meetings of the board and its executive
committee. * * * We place on record our appreciation of the life and
character of our departed brother/'
In 1886 Dr. James Eels, the well known professor of theology at Lane
(member of the board since 1882), passed to his reward. “His lofty char-
acter and wide influence in the cause of Christ.” as also his “interest in this
institution and his wise counsels and efforts in its behalf' are gratefully
acknowledged.
Two years more and the one to whom all looked as Elisha to Elijah was
translated. A great void was created for all friends of Wooster when John
Robinson, D.D., LL.D., died June 15, 1888. It was touching a battery of
reserved faith and courage to meet him. He had so long brooded over the
university in its prenatal state that he could not help hovering over it after-
wards. He prepared the early reports to the synods and the earliest appeals
to the churches. He was often on the executive committee (though not
resident in Wooster) and on the examining committees. He may fairly be
said to have done more for the university in the twenty-two years next after
the granting of the charter and before it than any other man. The handsome
bronze tablet, with its appropriate inscription, which used to stand on the main
stairway of the old building should be restored in the new. In the catalogue
of 1888-9, it is printed on a separate page that “for more than a quarter of a
century no publication concerning the synodical university was issued which
did not contain the name of this venerable man. He was its ardent advocate
as a hope and as a plan. After its realization he was the first, and, until his
death, the only president of its board of trustees. He gave it his energies,
his prayers and his means. * * * It is the fervent desire of the board of
trustees and of the faculty that his life-long views concerning the duty and the
opportunity of the church in the higher education under denominational con-
trol, may be regarded as typical among the ministers and churches of Ohio, as
it is their assured conviction that the memory of his high character and ma-
tured Christian graces and useful life will never perish from among us.” It
is added in the hoard's own minute that Doctor Robinson was never absent
from a meeting except on one occasion and then he was “visiting in Scotland."
“In every time of trial his wise counsel and courageous stand and loving ad-
herence to the right made him the centre about which others might rallv.
* * * He was meek, pure and straightforward, as he was prudent, per-
sistent and true. He presided with dignity and grace and cast over the meet-
ing of the board the tender unction and hallowed expression of one who
walked with God. His earnest and touching prayers lifted us to the verv
(33)
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portals of the skies. * * * A touching expression of his love to Wooster
University appears in the fact that, out of the scanty earnings of a long life
he has devoted one thousand dollars to establish a scholarship in memory of
his beloved wife. And we rejoice that the children of our honored friend
have signified their determination to found a similar scholarship to his mem-
ory/’
Xo one of all the noble men who have stood by the University in its
perplexities has been of more real service than the Honorable J. W. Robin-
son (of Marysville). Entering the board in 1871. he continued in deepest
interest and activity until his death, in 1899. He was thus identified with
the three decades of struggle and advance. The board records its “deep
sense of the loss sustained in the death of one of the University's earliest
and warmest friends. * * * He was in profoundest sympathy with the
principles for the maintenance and propagation of which the University was
founded. His counsels were characterized by eminent wisdom and in times
of special difficulty were marked by sagacity, foresight and gentle moderation.
He loved the University. In her prosperity he greatly rejoiced and when for
any cause her welfare seemed in jeopardy his sorrow was sincere and deep, but
not stronger than his patience and skill in helping to bring her out of trouble
and into a large and wealthy place.’ He was ever ready to lend a help-
ing hand to the University in the way of financial aid and the supreme token
of his fostering spirit in this respect was his legacy of ten thousand dollars
which has so lightened our load and brightened our future today.
“With thankfulness to God for giving the University such a friend, in
loving memory of his virtues and with solemn purpose to emulate his de-
votion to the interest of our beloved institution, we inscribe this memorial
upon our records."
In June, 1900, we lost a friend, the Rev. Dr. John H. Pratt, whose
membership in the board had been confined to the initial years from
the charter in 1866, to the opening in 1870. During that period he took
most effective part in aiding to construct the first curriculum and in fixing
the conditions of entrance. His efficient friendship was not limited to that
period, however. The board's minute says: “He was ever a devoted friend
of the University and. during these years, contributed liberally to its support —
his benefactions amounting to over twelve thousand dollars. He was a
sincere, devout and earnest Christian, whose life was a consistent, lovely
representation of the Christian character. In his various pastorates he
proved a faithful minister of the Covenant and was universally honorcd
and beloved by the entire community where he resided."
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Dr. Charles S. Pomeroy, long pastor of the Second Presbyterian church
of Cleveland, became a member of the board of trustees in 1883. He suc-
ceeded Dr. John Robinson as president of the board in 1888. He repre-
sented the University, amid surroundings which were strongly drawn in
other directions, always with discretion but always with firm preference
for the institution of church control and ownership. He died suddenly
in September, 1894. “Doctor Pomeroy,*’ says the record, “was a marked
man, distinguished for his natural abilities, his scholarly attainments, his
mechanical genius, his genial Christian character, his delightfully interest-
ing public address, his evangelistic and spiritually helpful preaching and his
wise counsels as a member of this body, and in the ecclesiastical bodies of
our church. He was a thorough Presbyterian, a firm defender of our faith and
was decided in his views of Presbyterian government. But his sympathies
were as broad as the Christian church and his voice was heard in the support
of whatever promised to be useful to men or for the enlargement of the
Redeemer’s Kingdom.”
In 1892, the resignation of John McClellan, as treasurer, was
reluctantly accepted by the board of trustees, and a testimonial (by
Doctor Taylor) was ordered to be read from the commencement plat-
form, declaring that “among the early advocates of the establishment of the
University none other aided with greater activity, zeal and liberality.” His
labors in connection with the erection of the main building were recognized
as “indefatigable and conspicuous.” His service as trustee and treasurer
endured for more than twenty-five years and “he was present at every meet-
ing of the board,” besides proving an “energetic and self-sacrificing member
of the executive committee.” As treasurer his administration was marked
by “wisdom, justice and kindness” and thus he “won the favor of the public,
the gratitude of the board, and the universal friendship of the faculty and
students.”
In 1900 (March 30), at nearly ninety years of age, Mr. McClellan died
in faith. The board of trustees again expressed its sense of his early and
abiding and effective interest in the University. He had executed his dif-
ficult duties “with conspicuous fidelity, skill and unusual knowledge of human
nature.” By his “devotion of extra labor and thought” and bv his “hope-
fulness in dark days he stimulated others to loyalty and consecration in
the work.” “The simplicity, transparent honesty and sterling integrity
of his character” are emphasized.
While the trusteeship of Jacob Frick was comparatively brief, it was
marked by deep interest and by generous and efficient aid in the financial dif-
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ficulties then encountered. The board laments his loss ( he died November
17, 1901) : “His simplictiy of manner, the honesty and integrity of his
character, his manifest helpfulness and kindness to others stamped him a man
of high Christian character.”
In June, 1898. the board of trustees, in accepting from J. H. Kauke the
gift of the property now known as the conservatory, passed resolutions of
heartfelt recognition of his “unselfish service” of many years in “advancing
the work to which he has given so much of his time, his strength, his means
and his prayers.” He died suddenly on Sabbath morning, March 20, 1904.
At its next meeting this minute was entered upon the record of the board,
expressing its deep sense of tbe “loss which the institution has sustained.’"
He was the oldest member of our board and the sole survivor (save one)
of the original incorporators. “Pre-eminent among the men whose labors
and liberality secured the location of the synodical college in this city, he
gave to it an untiring devotion and for thirty-eight years sacrificed time, money
and strength to its upbuilding, maintenance and enlargement. He had
passed the Mead line’ of fifty years when the University was founded, but
for more than a third of a century he gave his unfailing and exuberant vitality
to the care and nursing of the institution he loved. Day after day, usually
before attending to his own business, he was on the hill, attending to the
needs of professors and students with indefatigable zeal and patience.
“And this was true not alone of one season but of all seasons. Summer
and winter, day and night, he wrought and planned, meeting perplexities
and bridging difficulties, unceasingly careful in the economical use of the
University’s funds and giving, especially in later years, a large part of his
time gratuitously to the care of the building and grounds.
“His interests in both teachers and scholars was unfailing. He was
deeply interested in the struggles of the students while here and followed
them in after years with sympathetic watchfulness, rejoicing in their suc-
cess and grieving over their failures and defects. His own life-battle,
with his disadvantages and straitened circumstances in early life to the
comfort and affluence of later years, fitted him to be a true friend and coun-
sellor of those who in poverty were seeking to gain an education. After
eighty-six years of busy and fruitful labors he entered into rest.”
It would be hard to find in any community a more remarkable history
than the life-course of Captain Kauke. Some pains should be taken to pre-
sent it to this community as a priceless inheritance, an asset of more than
economic value, a perpetual stimulus to the nobler triumphs of character over
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circumstance and a brilliant tribute to native intellect and to its power, under
stimulus of high morality and a deep religious faith, to assimilate the most
valuable results of culture without submission to its tedious processes.
Two years later (June, 1906) the board traces carefully the life history
of the Rev. John C. Holliday, D.D., always useful and widely known — a
trustee from 1888 to 1906. He died suddenly while pastor at Norwood,
Ohio, on the 14th of February of the latter year. Absent in seventeen years
but from one meeting of the board and then far away in Palestine, he was a
model of punctuality. He had been the Prohibition candidate for governor
in 1897 and received the largest vote (7,558) ever given to a similar candidate.
He was especially useful to the whole church (Presbyterian) in our state by
the well-ordered scheme of home missions which he devised. “Fidelity, con-
scientiousness and efficiency characterized all his relations to the University.”
Dr. Holliday's solid acquirements, sustained convictions, and ready sympa-
thies conspired to make him a man of mark in any line of duty for Christ and
fellow men. The board expresses its “profound sense of the greatness of its
bereavement*”
At the same meeting (June, 1906) the death of Harry True (of Marion),
which had occurred since the February meeting of that year, was recorded.
He was a “trustee by lineage. His father, Dr. H. A. True, was one of the
original incorporators." * * * Despite large business interests he was a
faithful member of the Board. He was “too genuine a man to herald his
worth, but when put to the test he revealed his equipment and splendid char-
acter." He had unusual literary taste, and was “a manly man, an upright
citizen, a generous helper of a worthy cause, a friend worth having, always a
gentleman and a devout and consistent Christian."
Among the earlier trustees were two whose tenure of office was not long
but their interest was deep and permanent. Of these, William D. Johnson
(1873-5) endowed the chair of mathematics and astronomy in the sum of
twenty-five thousand dollars. This gift was one of the most encouraging
evidences of future success during the days of the early struggles. The board
marks “the exemplary spirit and devoted piety" of the generous trustee and
records its gratitude to God for the bequest in his will. It deserves to be
entered here that Mrs. Johnson, when the railroad bonds in which the endow-
ment was transferred were repudiated by the county which authorized them,
paid the interest ($1,500) for many years until finally by legal process the
county was compelled to make good the principal. It is hard to see how the
institution could just then have gone forward without this singular act of
generosity.
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The trusteeship of the Rev. Dr. R. B. Moore was also brief (1871-74). .
but he held a life-interest in the university's work and welfare. After other
donations, he gave, in 1904. ten thousand dollars as a foundation for a pro-
fessorship of astronomy and as a memorial to his life-long friend. Professor
Kirkwood. But a few months before his death in May, 1906, he “gave utter-
ance to the hope that the university would always remain true to the tradi-
tions and ideals of its founders/’
Brief mention, at least, should be made of many of these worthy men,
who have served in the capacity of trustees during these forty years. The
whole number is one hundred and forty-three. Of these, sixty-eight have
died. The list includes men of mark in all the professions. Naturally the
clergy were called upon first and seventy-six of the whole number have been
in the ministry. Teachers, lawyers, business men and now and then a phys;-
cian, make up the remainder. In the existing board, as by the catalogue of
1909-10, there appear twenty-five names (omitting the president, who is a
member ex officio). Of these, only six are clergymen (with a seventh who is
an honorary trustee), four are lawyers, one is an editor, one is an educator,
and the remainder are business men. It would be but just to remember that
the Rev. Dr. W. W. Colmery. one of the original board, is credited with
having aided William D. Johnson to decide in favor of endowing his professor-
ship. He also sent donations from his own slender resources when kept bv
increasing infirmity from attendance upon the meetings of the board. His
tenure lasted from 1866 to 1895. As much might be said for Hugh Bell's
long and faithful service from 1871 to 1898; for the short service of that
estimable Christian lawyer of Cadiz, Josiah Estep (i885-’88). Dr. B. K.
Ormond, once resident in our city, maintained an effective interest from
1893-1904. Dr. E. L. Raffensperger (of Marion) proposed the name which
the institution now bears, at the close of a long committee discussion. He
was instrumental in the proposed location at West Liberty. His term identi-
fied him with the period of inception ( 1866-70). The widely known attorney
at law. William Rush Taggart (now of New York, then of Salem. Ohio), was
a member of the board and an efficient aid from 1877 to 1889. J. G. Peebles
came a long way from Portsmouth and at an advanced age for the years be-
tween 1883 and 1897. He gave freely of bis own means and appropriated
to the use of the university a bequest of two thousand dollars, the disposal of
which had been left to his judgment by his sister. Mrs. Hamilton. Dr. George
C. Heckman (1855-88). the Rev. Dr. David A. Wallace ( 1880-83). the ^ev-
Dr. Thomas A. McCurdy ( 1876-85). Dr. Willis Lord ( 1877-9), Dr. David
A. Tappan (1897-9). Dr. J. R. llelwig { 1894-98) and Dr. George P. Hays
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(1887-8) were all college presidents and gave the values of their varied ex-
periences to the counsels of the governing body. Dr. Abram D. Hawn of
Delaware ( 1874-79) still survives to maintain a loyal interest in Wooster;
Dr. A. B. Marshall ( 1890 to ’94), then of East Liverpool and now in transitu
to the presidency of the theological seminary at Omaha, should be coupled
with Dr. William McKibbin (1894-1902), now president of Lane Theological
Seminary, in appreciative remembrances. The Hon. A. E. Jones, recently
commissioner of education in Ohio and long superintendent at Massillon, gave
us good counsel from 1893 to 1901. Judge William McSurely. since busied
in important cases in Chicago, gave most efficient help during reconstruction
after the fire ( 1901 -4) having secured a most welcome donation of five thou-
sand dollars from the authorities of the Pennsylvania Leased Lines. Myron
Wick (of Youngstown), elected in 1901. generously aided in the rebuilding
and then in completing the great effort to reach the five-hundred-thousand dol-
lar point in 1908, on reaching which so much was conditioned. He resigned
last year and this year has been called to higher service in the better land. Alva
Agee, now of Pennsylvania State College, was with us heart and soul from
1905-8 during his residence in our city. Samuel J. McMahon (Cambridge
banker) was generously efficient from 1888-1903. Taken all in all, this list
of one hundred and forty-three trustees helps to prove that the synodical col-
lege has proved to be solidly imbedded in the best heart and mind of our
church in this state. Wooster has been able to command those who were
able to serve her interests intelligently as well as faithfully.
During the third administration (June, 1893) ^ie proper steps were
ordered for enlarging the number of the trustees by synod-election from nom-
inations by the “alumni at the annual meeting of the Central Alumni Associa-
tion.'' This action was carried out, involving the passing of a general law
by the General Assembly of Ohio. It has proven a wise and satisfactory step.
A number of those most interested and useful in the board have been added
by this expedient: and this result will be cumulative in the future.
There have been five presidents of the board. Dr. John Robinson ( i86f>-
1888) ; Dr. Charles S. Pomeroy ( 1888-1894) : Dr. A. A. E. Taylor ( 1895-
1902) : Dr. Samuel S. Palmer ( 1902-5) and Louis H. Severance, the present
incumbent. Lucas Flattery was the first secretary, in office from 1866 to
1878. Dr. T. K. Davis succeeded in a service of thirty years from 1878 to
1908. Since then Jesse McClellan has held the office, as he has held that of
treasurer from 1885. succeeding his father, John McClellan, whose tenure of
that important office lasted from 1866 to 1885.
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Among the fiscal secretaries mention must be made of Dr. George P.
Hays’ pioneering and organizing in 1868 and 1869, without which the raising
of the two hundred fifty thousand dollars endowment deemed indispensable for
setting the university in motion could not have been realized, and of Dr. T. K.
Davis’ continuous and successful employment in this capacity from 1871 to
1875. The Rev. Robert M. Donaldson gave up choice pastorates for this
difficult work from 1895 to 1898. Since 1904 the burden has rested upon
those experienced workmen in this vineyard fin which there are grapes enough
but not easily accessible), the Rev. Charles R. Compton, Ph. D., and the Rev.
Samuel W. Douglas. One who knows something of their task heartily wishes
them the faith and patience which alone can perpetually ( to use a borrowed
expression) “renew the solicitor's nerve.”
It is due the faithfulness and efficiency of Dr. T. K. Davis, connected with
the university in one capacity or another from April 1, 1867 — thus reaching
forty-three years and constituting a longer nexus than now exists with any
other person living — to give place to an extract from his letter to the board
when resigning the secretaryship in 1908: “The institution was founded on
the Rock of Ages, by men of profound convictions in this central and influen-
tial state, at a time when the older and wealthier colleges of the country
seemed to be losing their grip on the Christian faith. Merely as an additional
college to the many in Ohio it was not needed. But as a college connected
with and controlled by the Presbyterian church it was greatly needed. The
Presbyterian church in Ohio was suffering and losing ground for want of a
college of its own. I believed that it was needed by our country and the
world as a college that would stand for Christ and the Bible as long as the
Presbyterian church in Ohio would be faithful to her Lord and Master. Mv
work as secretary has kept me in touch all these years with the internal life
and work of the university and it has been a great joy to me that the trustees
and faculty have never wavered from the position taken by the board of
trustees at the first meeting in December. 18 66.” [See the resolutions quoted
elsewhere in this sketch.]
The most important section of the board of trustees is and always has been
the executive committee. It is something of an equalizing consideration to
remember that if our city receives some special advantages from the university
it must always contribute the management through this committee — in close
connection with the president as a member ex officio — of many most important
concerns of the university-life. Questions of policy as well as of detail come
l>efore it for decision. Some are committed directly to it by the board, and
others are urgent because the meetings of the board are infrequent. There
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must be management of the investments also by a sub-committee (on finance).
There is constant demand for time and judgment and sympathetic study of
various situations on the part of the executive committee. Right nobly have
our best citizens responded to these demands during these more than forty
years. I may not dare to specialize beyond mentioning the extraordinary
devotion of John H. Kauke — for so many years the chairman — and the con-
tinuous and indispensable services of the Rev. Dr. O. A. Hills since 1885.
Every crisis through which the university has passed has called for renewed
devotion and activity on the part of this committee.
Closely connected with the general work of the trustees, there has ex-
isted since 1892 an advisory board of women. The number was to be equal
to that of the trustees and their names were to be reported to the synod for
confirmation. It was a roving commission under which this advisory board
was organized ; but its main design was always as clear as it was important.
It was meant to bring together representative women from each presbytery
who with womanly tact and intuition would find ways to increase the efficiency
of the institution in all matters pertaining to the young women who came into
residence in the university. In 1896 “the board, recognizing the zeal with
which the advisory board have given themselves to the work of fostering the
university, would suggest to them that they have a sub-committee Who shall
regularly visit the institution and report from time to time to the faculty or
board what, in their judgment, would promote the efficiency of the university
especially in the matter of securing to our young lady students accommodations
and surroundings that will approximate their life in the university to that
of a Christian home.” The thanks of the board for continued aid along the
lines in which so much has been done to increase the attractiveness of the
institution to the mothers and daughters of our constituency, have been fre-
quently expressed. As early as June, 1880, Doctor Taylor had suggested a
“Woman’s Association to aid in promoting the higher education of young
women in the university.” The usefulness of the advisory board is constant-
ly increasing and their suggestions receive most respectful attention from the
trustees. It was in connection with this organization that the efficient work
of Mrs. Dr. J. H. W. Stuckenberg was done in forming Wooster leagues in
several Ohio cities. These organizations quickened interest in certain circles
to the point of valuable co-operation.
Closely connected with the foregoing items must be mentioned the honor-
roll of those who through the financial pilgrimage of the forty years past have
been signal helpers. There heads the list, of course, the fine face and figure
of Ephraim Ouinby, Jr., whose gift of the campus undoubtedly secured the lo-
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cation of the university at W ooster, and who gave, also, later a professorship.
The pastor Reed gave encouragement and prevailing prayer. Capt. John H.
Kauke gave liberal donations at the beginning, a full professorship later, paid
for the transfer of the conservatory property, and always an inexhaustible store
of personal concern and superintendence. The Johnson professorship was a
gleam of hope for the larger endowments so much needed. David Robison.
Jr., gave means and time as a member of the original board of trustees and
is now its sole survivor. Mr. Purdy, of Mansfield, and John Black, of Zanes-
ville. added some of the larger sums of the early days. Mr. and Mrs. Boyd
Mercer endowed the Biblical chair. Mrs. Mary Myers was one of the few
who could add five thousand dollars to the original subscriptions for endow-
ment. Early and middle and late. Dr. J. H. Pratt came to the institution’s
help. C. S. Bragg, of Cincinnati, planted the first library as a centre of
intellectual stimulus with a gift of five thousand dollars. In the middle period
there came to us William Thaw's repeated gifts, including the two thousand
five hundred dollars which made certain the Hoge professorship of morals
and sociology. And Mrs. William Thaw founded a memorial scholarship to
that noble Christian gentleman (her father), Josiah Copley. Then came,
from the same beneficent hand, the five thousand dollars and more, which
realized that finely-conceived plan — the homes for the children of missionaries.
Benjamin S. Brown, of Columbus, gladdened all hearts bv a perpetual scholar-
ship (one thousand dollars) and a professorship (twenty-five thousand dol-
lars). Selah Chamberlain's ten-thousand-dollar bequest carried us over the
construction exigencies of 1891-2, and literally gave ns "wings." Henry
Flagler, of New York, gave one thousand dollars. That veteran of Christian
service, John Peebles, of Portsmouth, helped the work for himself and for his
sister, Mrs. Hamilton. Judge J. W. Robinson’s bequest of ten thousand dol-
lars, with Dr. Pratt's five thousand dollar gift, prepared the wav for the large
things which were to come.
And what an honor-roll is that of the past eleven years! H. C. Frick's
library building was not only a promise of spring, but the “one swallow"
which, contrary to the proverb, seemed enough to “make a summer." Then
came Mrs. Davidson and the Memorial Chapel with Mrs. Livingstone Taylor's
five thousand dollar organ in it, and the five times greater, later gift in the
stress of the effort for the five hundred thousand dollars ending with March
31. 1908. And how these larger givers have multiplied since the fiery ordeal!
Here begin the astonishing gifts of Andrew Carnegie; of the Rockefeller (ien-
eral Education Board; and of the ever-generous patron-saint (shall 1 say) of
the institution. Louis H. Severance. Along with these how wonderfully
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sprang up from willing hearts and open hands the large gifts of John Con-
verse (of Philadelphia), of Dr. R. B. Moore: of Mrs. Darwin James and
other ‘‘elect ladies” of New York; of Mrs. Samuel Mather (of Cleveland), of
Miss Denny and Miss Spring and Mrs. Curry, of Pittsburgh: of Solon Sever-
ance, who took such effective pity on the condition of a library magnificently
housed but helpless to fill its own shelves. There have kept coming from
very many sources the scholarships (of one thousand dollars each) for pay-
ment of tuition for the children of missionaries. There have also been entered
some large contributions on the annuity plan, which will prove no doubt, to
be the forerunners of yet more numerous arrangements of this character — a
plan so satisfactory to the annuitant and so certain ultimately to enrich the
treasury of the university.
All these things are recorded (and it is but a partial enumeration) that
faith and hope may be animated by experience. In the crisis of rebuilding
how plainly it Was proven in some of the larger gifts, already recounted, and
in the prompt and generous response of the city of Wooster through James
Mullin’s gift of five thousand dollars, with Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Frick's one
thousand dollars and the similar sum from Walter Mullins and from Mr. and
Mrs. John ' McSvveeney, besides the self-denying smaller gifts from every-
where, that the high purpose of Wooster's founders would never lack
friends and helpers. So it has been and so it will always be. True to her
noble mission, help and deliverance will arise in every exigency. Patient
waiting and working are the only conditions of prosperity for an institution
devoted to the aims for which Wooster was founded.
VIII. THE ALUMNI.
Here is a most winning theme and one full of interest. Only the rigid-
ities of time and space could compel a brief treatment.
The number for the forty years compares strikingly well with the out-
put of institutions which have ampler state foundations or are created by
hitherto unprecedented private endowments. It is much beyond the record of
any ecclesiastical college known to the writer. The grand total gives ns col-
legiate alumni up to May, 1910, 1402. All departments carry the figure to
1705. The report to synod (October. 1909), is willing to test all college life
by “the service it renders to the world through its alumni.” A table is printed
showing that of the 1393 graduates of the collegiate department. 378 (27.13
per cent) have gone into religious work: 376 (26.99 per cent) into collegiate
and secondary teaching: 142 (10.19 per cent) into law: 91 (6.53 per cent)
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into medicine and 236 (16.94 per cent) into business. Wooster has furnished
1 1 college presidents and 54 college professors, of whom 44 are men and 10
are women — a contribution of 67 members to the faculties of institutions of
full collegiate or university standing. “The quality of the scholarship product
of Wooster is indicated by three facts; first the large and growing demand for
Wooster alumni as college professors and for important positions in normal
schools, academies and high schools : second, the books of scholarly merit
written by Wooster men ; third, the large number who pursue graduate
courses in the large universities and the many fellowships and scholarships
which they win in competitive theses or by their high grade of work during
their first graduate year.” Abundant details exist to make good these claims.
Ten fellowships were won during 1903-4. Four of a then recent class took
fellowships at Yale, Columbia, Chicago, and Wisconsin. A “Roll of Honor”
has been voted for those who do such things.
The distribution of the alumni shows the Wooster preparation for a life-
work is not limited to any environment. Out in the West, there are 24 in
California. 20 in Colorado, 10 in North Dakota, in Oregon, 13; in Kansas,
28 ; in Washington, 22. Coming Eastward, we find 62 in Illinois, 477 in
Ohio. 125 in Pennsylvania. In Massachusetts there are 10; New York, 58.
Going to the far East, there are 15 in India and 30 in China. Again we must
regret the necessity of omitting most of the names of those referred to. Mere
mention can be made of such men as Professor Hyslop, in moral and mental
science: Joseph Collins, in mathematics; William Henderson, in chemistry:
Professor Culler (Miami), in physics; Dr. Edgar Work, in authorship; W. W.
White, in the great Bible school of New York, and J. C. White, at the head of
the laymen’s missionary movement, and Professor Kingery (Wabash), with
his editions of Latin texts, and many distinguished missionaries; and ex-Gov-
ernor Morrison and Professor Chadock of Pennsylvania University, and Pro-
fessor Wallace Notestein (history) and ex-President James Wallace, whose
heroic devotion saved Macalester College; and of such women as Mrs. Ella
Alexander Boole, Mrs. Mary Mills, Mrs. Hanna Cox and the Misses Popper.
These names, taken almost at random, give evidence of real vitality in Woos-
ter’s work.
Every year the bond strengthens as the number increases. Organiza-
tion is being perfected rapidly. The next decade will bring the fiftieth anni-
versary and observation convinces the writer that the semi-centennial is a point
of new departure for the alumni of a great and growing institution. Wooster
men and women have better means now of knowing what the other Wooster-
ites are doing. The admirable Alumni Round Table in the Wooster Quarter -
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ly is now supplemented by a regular bulletin, packed with information. Woos-
ter’s diploma means more each year. The children of the benign mother's
first generation are coming to drink of the same fountain. The four mission-
heroes, Ritchie, Pinkerton, Devor and Noyes, lie buried in China, Brazil and
Africa; but their souls “are marching on” in the recruits who annually say:
“Here am I, send me.” Wooster’s alumni have given one professorship
twenty-five thousand dollars and they know this is but a beginning for an ever-
enlarging body in ministering to the ever-growing demands of advanced
Christian thinking and knowing and doing. Experience has proven that the
high-grade students (taken by classes) do the high-grade work in life. A great
mission is worth great preparation.
IX. HISTORY BY DEPARTMENTS.
i. First, attention may be given to those which have disappeared. And
among these the first place is due to the medical department. Undoubtedly
our institution owed its title of “university” to the expectation that a medical
department would begin its functions at once and be followed bv a department
of law. The main building bore distinct traces of adaptation to the need of
a medical department. But it was found expedient to accept an already estab-
lished medical school, a “going concern” in Cleveland. It opened simultane-
ously with the collegiate department. There were long struggles to maintain
it by the self-denying and capable professors. Hospital facilities were lacking
at times. For a while it became only a summer school. Reorganization was
had and enlargement of facilities followed. Standard instruction was given.
Four years were required for completing the course. Some of Cleveland’s
best surgeons were members of its faculty. A building for instruction be-
came imperatively necessary. That was beyond the power of the university
at the time. A change was acceded to and the medical department passed
under the charter of the Ohio Wesleyan University. Just now in the inter-
ests of each institution and of medical education in general, a union has been
formed with the medical department of Western Reserve University, long
known for unusually good facilities and high standards of admission. In
bidding this department farewell in 1895, the following was published: “It
has been impossible for the university, burdened with the beginnings of things,
to occupy any other than an almost passive position toward the medical de-
partment at Cleveland. What could be done without assuming any pecuniary
responsibility was done in the hope that the enterprise might find such friends
in its immediate surroundings, as would meet its needs. * * * The rec-
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ord of the past twenty-six years has been an honorable one for the university
and for the medical faculty, which has managed to sustain the entire expenses
of the department and to maintain a high standard of efficiency/’
A second department has been discontinued — the military. It opened
under Lieutenant (now Captain) A. C. Sharpe in 1883. His commission to
teach was renewed and he remained until 1888. Lieutenant Wilkinson suc-
ceeded him for two years and the instruction ceased in 1890. On the whole,
the experiment succeeded. The drill was an effective, mainly out-door, sup-
plement to the gymnasium instruction. The carriage of men who underwent
the exercises was strikingly improved. The result was good as to health, as
to neatness, and as to the habit of immediate and simultaneous movement
under orders. The university endeavored to administer the trust implied in
the appointment of an officer conscientiously, and favorable reports, we under-
stand. were made to the government by the officers of inspection.
The post-graduate department opened in the collegiate year of 1881-2.
Doctor Taylor, its originator, was later its dean. Half a dozen courses of
advanced work were laid down to be pursued in absentia, but with a view to
constant and detailed examination of the studies and laboratory work. These
courses were strengthened from time to time until they seemed to be full
equivalents for the work demanded for similar degrees in the larger institu-
tions. There were disadvantages, no doubt, connected with such a plan, but
they were reduced to a minimum by great care in the selection of candidates
for these advanced degrees, such previous preparation being insisted upon as
made it reasonably certain that they could profitably pursue their studies with
no further direction by the professor in charge than could be given by corre-
spondence. The members enrolled grew beyond expectation and it was dem-
onstrated that a large class exists which desires direction in advanced studies,
but for which university-residence is impossible. Ministers, teachers, pro-
fessors, with a few lawyers and physicians, entered the lists. Rut finally the
burden grew too heavy for the smaller faculty of that day. and a sentiment
hostile to all in absentia study developed in the college circles. During 1898-9
measures were taken to bring the work to a close. Xo new candidates were
received and the last degrees were conferred in 1903.
2. The library of a college is increasingly esteemed as one of its most
important departments. That that should not have even the endowment of a
single professorship which underbuilds all the professorships is a scandal — to
say nothing of the demand upon the general fund for appropriations to meet
current expenses. It has not been for want of the right estimate of the
library-function that Wooster is still minus a library endowment. Even when
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small, the library was diligently used. Housed in its plain shelves more
“takings’’ were recorded than were found to exist in an institution with a
sixtv-thousand-dollar library building. The four stages of development in-
clude the primal donation of C. S. Bragg (American Book Company, Cincin-
nati). That five thousand dollars attracted other library fragments. Better
facilities came under the second administration with a librarian and the estab-
lishment of a reading room. The third stage comes with the “wings” in the
third administration. About 1892 there was a separate stack-room and a
larger reading room furnished with suitable desks and the beginning of better
cataloguing. Judge Welker’s important gift of a complete set of Congres-
sional Records was hailed with joy, as were the contributions from Dr. James
Hoge’s library. The contributions of the second president. Doctor Taylor,
at various times, exceed in number and value the gifts of any other contributor,
Mr. Bragg’s excepted. It was most fitting that the uplifting gift of H. C.
Frick should be the first bird of promise in the fourth administration. That
building, planned by Ximmons (Wooster ’87), is the classic ornament of the
whole campus. It contains all conceivable library conveniences in its com-
pleted form (1906). As an initial surprise it amazed us — but as a complete
l:ook-palace it comforts and reassures us. We cannot long have such a cage
without the birds it is built for. The appeal is now made in connection with
the present strenuous effort for increased endowment by the president, to
whose Midas-touch the building was the first response. It is a pleasure to
echo that appeal here. Let the benevolent remember scripta manent. Books
are the waymarks of civilization. I wish it were possible to tarry here for
even brief characterization of the admirable and thoughtful addresses pro-
nounced at the dedication, including the eloquent tribute of President Holden
to the generous donor. Xor can I stay to trace the growth of the really valu-
able library already within this handsome enclosure. Professor Xotestein
saved the old library by insisting upon its removal to the scarcely complete
new building but a month or two before the destruction by fire of the old
building. And he has been acknowledged generalissimo of the progress since.
He founded the mission-alcove with the proceeds ( three hundred dollars) of
a prize won by his brain and pen. He has pushed forward the Dewey system
of cataloguing. He has presided over a number of purchases which have
given us many a series of Poole-indexed publications rapidly becoming inac-
cessible. Special obligations are due to Messrs. L. H. and Solon Severance,
of Cleveland, whose tastes and travels have led them to 1>e the largest (almost
the only) givers of large sums to the library-shelves. The whole faculty and
the whole student-body join in thanking them. The accession-lists show over
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thirty-four thousand books as the total enrollment of these seried ranks of
learning’s infantry. Excluding duplicates and losses (as well as pamphlets),
we have now about thirty thousand volumes. From October i, 1908, to Sep-
tember 30, 1909, net gain was one thousand three hundred forty-one volumes,
besides six hundred eighty-seven pamphlets. Whoever says “library"’ in
Wooster says Dr. T. K. Davis, the honored librarian emeritus. Much as Miss
Bechtel deserves praise for accuracy and system and patience and ability to
make the library useful to its maximum, and much as we must gladly acknowl-
edge the valuable service of her assistants, the meed of esteem and admiration
must not be withheld from him, whose efficient care (“respect property” e. g.)
and perfect knowledge of the library’s resources all along its growth have
furnished just the aid required in the studies and general culture of the
student-body. How earnestly he has endeavored to make the room a “temple
of silence” that it might be a temple of thought also. What a brave fight he
has made for the elusive intellectual as against the intrusive emotional ! Many
generations of students rise up to call him blessed.
3. A third specific work is that of the preparatory department. At the
close of the first collegiate year order was taken by the board, through the
executive committee and the faculty, for the organization of a sub-freshman
class. This resulted in the whole department which entered upon its work
with the opening of 1872-3 and was cordially approved at the close of that
year by the board. The dangers of such an experiment were fully appreciated
and wisely guarded against from the beginning and high standards were in-
sisted upon which have brought their reward ever since. The Rev. J. A. I.
Lowes, an experienced superintendent of schools, was the first principal. De-
tails of subsequent history may be omitted, save to mention that some of our
best professors did their first work in this department and thereby earned
their promotion. Miss E. Pendleton, A. M., deserves the greatest esteem for
having contributed to and conserved the best spirit of the department since
1889. Adjunct professor of English since 1901. An epoch arrived with the
principalship of J. H. Dickason. In 1895 he became instructor and temporary
principal. In 1896 he was made principal and adjunct professor of Latin
and given a seat in the faculty. Progress in all directions has been constantly
made. Demand arose as early as 1896-7 for a school of review and improved
methods for the teachers of secondary schools. This has resulted in the pres-
ent permanent arrangement for pedagogical instruction in this department.
An earlier demand ( 1897) was perceived for a commercial department. After
various experiments this, too, has found a safe and permanent lodgment in the
academy with excellent appointments and a varied curriculum. As early as
ten years ago a full four years’ course was provided with such variations in
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the curriculum as make the department eminently serviceable, even for those
who do not expect to pursue the higher education. The very first class under
the new arrangement graduated twenty-five. It is believed that the courses
now offered “present as valuable and compact groups of four years of study
as can be selected." Experienced instructors only are employed. Credit is
accepted from high schools. Reports are made three times a year to parents.
“Helping hours'" are provided for those who “show marked need of super-
vision/" and thus better habits of study are attained. The latest catalogue
shows two hundred and eight, not counting those in the commercial course.
The department's ideal is the first-class New England Academy. That ideal
is elementary thoroughness and accuracy, as determining the student’s future
success. The equipment of the academy in Taylor Hall is believed to lie
superior to any similar department in connection with any college. German
is the only language from the first lesson in that tongue. The academy gradu-
ates easily find employment as teachers. In the college-life the sophomore
prizes, in the proportion of nineteen out of twenty-six students, have gone to
those prepared in the academy. Senior honor-men and oratorical and debat-
ing honors show the same results.
4. The summer school comes naturally next. Its beginnings are (rela-
tively) ancient. The modest arrangement of 1876 was designed to give
“students the opportunity to bring up studies in which they were deficient.'*
Twenty students were enrolled. Fourteen of these are classified elsewhere in
the catalogue and the summer school contingent, pure and simple, was just
six. The purposes declared in catalogue of 1879 were more complex. (1)
For teachers; (2) for those below entrance standard; (3) for those less pro-
ficient in their classes; (4) for the winter-school teachers; (5) for conditioned
collegians. The president, assisted by “a select corps of teachers," was put in
charge. In 1883-4, Professor John Boyd took care of the school. Professor
James Wallace followed in 1884-5 with emphasis on making up college de-
ficiencies. Thus it went on with varying success and small numbers — Prof.
John G. Black being mostly responsible for the management. In 1893-4 cata-
logue, fifty-three enrollments are reported. In 1896 J. H. Dickason joined
Professor Black and special work for teachers in preparation for examina-
tions or positions was undertaken. That was the need to be met. It has proved
a veritable foundation of sweet waters — a sort of artesian well. Lectures
were provided in 1897 an(l aims more fully advertised. One hundred forty
were in attendance. In 1898. two hundred were reported. The next year
(Dickason and Sauvain. principals) the number rose to two hundred eighty-
three.
(34)
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In 1900 the special imprimatur of the hoard of trustees was put upon
the growing enterprise “as an invaluable adjunct to the educational forces of
the institution/’ Use of buildings was formally granted and an annual re-
port to the board’s winter-meeting suggested. By the betterment of each
year’s temporary faculty and vigorous use of all methods of making known
the attractions of the place, the patronage was steadily increased until it
reached and just passed the mark of a thousand enrollments for this year
(1910). The university buildings are overtaxed and the city authorities allot
a neighboring school house. The busiest of educational centres during the
eight weeks is here. Reviews for examination, studies in methods, sciences
(mental, social and natural), mathematics, history, languages, all are pursued
with prompt vigor. Besides all the regular work there are chapel hours with
ringing addresses, and “round-table” conferences, with the accompaniment
of clicking type-writers and hammer-blows in the manual training and the
ripple of musical fingers and the songs of choral singing and the competitive
struggle of orators; to say nothing of the wit and wisdom of the high-class
lecturers or the wild yells of the ball ground or the fearfully early excursions
of the nature students, or the savory odors of the domestic-science department.
Much of the work is elementary, but some of it counts, according to strict
regulations, on college credits and even for the Master’s degree. The admir-
able location, the well-adapted buildings, the co-operation of the university
faculty, the enthusiasm of members, the impulse of practical values, the com-
parison of experiences, the ample library and the very brevity of the flying
weeks; all tend to make the summer school a scene of intense life and fruitful
endeavor. Yet variety and recreation are so wisely intermingled with stimu-
lus and exertion that the whole effect is refreshing rather than exhausting and
cannot but tell powerfully on the general level of the teaching force of the
state. It cannot be doubted that the marked success of Wooster’s summer
school has incited so many like enterprises that the good custom has now be-
come well-nigh universal. A markedly successful feature is found in the
helpful teachers’ agency by the arrangements of which positions are secured,
the salaries of which aggregate something beyond half a million ! The genial
Superintendent Dickason is known throughout the state and not only finds his
wav to institutes and other meetings of teachers, but sends them, through all
avenues, a literature of penetrating freshness and homely wit and of convic-
tions that are convincing.
5. The University of Wooster was early convinced of the dignity and
value of music and art as instruments of culture and character. The way
was found open for something of art work almost from the very beginning of
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the second administration (1873). Drawing for the preparatory department
and some mechanical draughting for the collegiate were introduced. Special-
ized work seems to have begun in the year 1875 under the intelligent care of
Miss Louise Stoddard. Miss Josephine Ormond (now Mrs. Calder) took
charge in 1884 and 1885, notably extending the course. Miss Emma Sonne-
decker (now Mrs. Spencer) presided from i892-’96, following Miss Nellie
Coover, i887-’9i. Since the installation of Miss Claribel Durstine (1896) the
scope of the instruction has been enlarged, additional facilities have been pro-
vided in the new buildings, and the department has been recognized in college
credits, and as furnishing electives when the literature of the subjects is com-
bined with the practice of the various arts. It is increasingly useful and at-
tractive.
The musical department was opened in 1882. Doctor Taylor saw his
opportunity to engage in it Dr. Karl Merz, already a teacher, writer and
editor of great reputation in Ohio and elsewhere in the United States. Karl
Merz (the simple dignity of history most befits him) was born in Germany and
at first dedicated to the priesthood. At the age of about eighteen he broke
away from that purpose and came to Philadelphia where he began at once his
career as organist and teacher. At first violently Romanist in conviction (so
much so as to tear out of a volume presented to him by his pupils the portrait
and history of Luther), he finally became an equally earnest Protestant Chris-
tian. “When I had experienced/' he said, “the lightning of the Gospel I
understood the thunder of Luther." He would have devoted himself at once
to the ministry but for the advice of his trusted friend, Dr. O. N. Stoddard.
Both were then in Oxford, Ohio. It is significant of his integrity that when
in 1871 the present writer, representing the Pennsylvania College for Women,
sought to disengage him for a much more lucrative position, he refused be-
cause of a pledge given to the proprietor of the female college in which he had
charge of the department of music. At the golden moment when release had
come, Wooster was fortunate enough and Doctor Taylor venturesome and
wise enough to secure his services. The board would only approve the plan
provided that “music should not be made a part of the regular course and that
the instruction be self-sustaining." But, with Karl Merz at the oar success
was certain. He was not only well and favorably known but a tireless worker
and a man of many resources and much ingenuity in their employment. From
the beginning the elevated views of this remarkable man were accepted and
cherished with enthusiasm by his pupils, by the university circle and by the
whole community. Frequent public expression was given to these views.
Perhaps as satisfactory a quotation as any may be made from words of the
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present writer, published in 1895, anc^ showing the permanency of the first im-
pressions : “Music will not be taught merely as an ornamental accomplishment*
but as part of a complete education. It has been placed upon an equality with
other selective studies. The literary atmosphere of the university ought to
stimulate the development of musical culture and should receive a certain
warmth from its presence. The school of music is organized with a four-fold
purpose: (1) To combine musical and literary studies as a broad basis for
regular collegiate work. ( 2) to use the art of music as a means of intellectual,
aesthetic and moral culture: (3) to furnish instruction in all branches of music
to special and general students: (4) to educate teachers of music/*
Karl Merz interested the public first by lectures on the Saturday after-
noons, accompanied with performance by pupils. Then, as numbers grew, he
yielded to persuasion and entered upon the series of oratorio concerts which
has been continued to this day and which has resulted in distinct education and
elevation of musical taste and feeling in our entire community. As early as
1888 there were two hundred and sixty names enrolled. One of the most
interesting efforts was called “a musical trip around the world*’ in which, in
successive afternoons, primitive music and national anthems and customs were
illustrated and explained. One said of a certain Palestrina concert, given in a
series upon epochs of musical development : “Only in Wooster coufd such a
programme be heard.” The degree of Doctor of Music was conferred, I think,
in 1885. His salary was increased. He was made a member of the faculty
and the hope was expressed “that he may not be disturbed in his position by
any flattering offers but may continue at the head of our musical department
which owes its advanced position and remarkable success so largely to his
masterly management and rare devotion/'
When he called my attention to a specially complimentary notice by the
editor of a Philadelphia musical journal (The Etude ,) he added sadly: “But
this all comes too late. It is the swan’s song.” Strangely enough, it was but
a few months thereafter that he was snatched away from us. Let me quote
here the language Qf the minute I submitted to the board, in June. 1890 —
after his death on January 30th of that year. “ * * * We regard it
alike our duty and privilege to put thus upon record for those who come after
us, our vivid appreciation of the divine favor in having given Professor Merz
to the university to leave the stamp of his elevating and refining and religious
influence upon the important work to which he gave himself. He was a thor-
ough artist, deeply learned in the literature of his art, a tireless worker, a
brilliant editor, gentle and winning in his address, the truest of friends, the
fondest of fathers, and a thoroughly devout and consistent Christian. It is
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our fervent prayer that the department may preserve forever the impression
of his cultivated taste, his unwearied industry and his devout piety.”
Dr. Henry Hubert Haas remained but one year and proved a contrast to
his predecessor in several important respects. But he was an excellent teacher
of the piano.
The University called home from his studies in Germany one of its
own graduates, a favorite pupil of Karl Merz — D. F. Conrad (class of *86).
His work from 1891-3 was most eminently satisfactory. He was skillful,
prompt and faithful. Further study lured him away again to Germany
and he was succeeded by Mr. J. Byron Oliver, who continued in office until
removed by death in January, 1905. Time enough has passed to disclose
the many aspects of character and talent for which Director Oliver deserves
to he held, as he is held, in affectionate remembrance among us. He grew
in the practice of his profession and in general culture. He proved to be
an excellent conductor of the oratorio chorus and brought out the old and
the new successfully. He was permitted to install the small first organ
and, after the fire, to direct the construction of the great instrument with
which Mrs. Livingstone Taylor indowed the department and the chapel. The
“Singers’ Club” gained wide reputation under his care and the “White
Robed Choir” was introduced. As it was with Karl Merz, so was it with
Byron Oliver — nothing could be suffered to disturb the deep reverence each
felt for everything which had to do with the “service of song in the house of
the Lord.” An elaborate minute was inscribed by the board of trustees
upon its record and a memorial window bears testimony to the continued
regard cherished for him. I quote a few words from the minute referred to :
“He was equally beloved as a teacher and as a man. He possessed a
charming personality with unaffected simplicity of manner, always gentle-
manly in speech and conduct. * * * Not a hard master * * * by
mingled gentleness and persistency * * * he brought forward the least
promising to some measure of creditable achievement. * * * His influ-
ence in the musical education of the city was widespread. It has been well
said : ‘His passion for the best things in his art has been communicated to
the University life, and has made us familiar with the best products of con-
secrated genius.’ ” There were touching evidences of the fact that he “had
won the warmest place in the hearts of all cultivated people of the city.”
Director J. L. Erb came at once in 1905 from a recognized position in
New York and has proved in every wav worthy of his eminent predecessors.
In speaking and writing (he has written a life of the celebrated German mu-
sician— Brahms), in the art of composition and in that of conducting
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he has proven equal to all the demands of the position. The department
grows in character as in numbers. The Conservatory is well adapted to
its uses and the outlook is promising.
Along with these talented directors the department has enjoyed the
services of many instructors of rare gifts. Tn piano-teaching mention must
especially be made of Miss Mary T. Glenn (1898-1904), of Mr. Carey E.
McAfee (1895-98) and of Miss Edna B. Riggs — since 1901 — made adjunct
professor in 1907. In vocal instruction we were privileged in the rare voice
and fine method of Mrs. Minnie L. (Carrothers) McDonald (1891-1901),
in the admirable work of Mrs. Francis E. (Glenn) Brewer (1901-4), as
‘in that of Miss Miller and Mrs. Wilson (of Columbus) for shorter periods.
Under Mr. Harrold Hutchins the vocal outlook is now better than for some
years. The violin — a department of instrumental music we would gladly
have enlarged — has known the brilliant touch of Miss Anna M. Hunt
(1893-5) anfl the rare talent of the virtuoso Mrs. Caroline (Harter) Wil-
liams. and the sound instruction of Mr. George F. Schwartz, now presid-
ing successfully over a large department of music in the West. Carl Duer-
ringer, the present teacher, is both proficient as a performer and diligent
as a teacher. It is hoped that a small orchestra can now be formed.
The epochs in the growth of the department have been the inauguration
of the larger chorus work and the enlargement of ‘‘Old Music Hall” under
the first director, for which the credit is due to Dr. O. A. Hills. Then came
the first organ (1894-5). Then a degree. Bachelor of Music, was granted
the graduates (but that was abandoned in 1899). Various extensions and
modifications of the course were made and hvmnologv introduced as a
subject of study. The Conservatory was fitted up and occupied, and then,
after the fire, came the great organ in Memorial Chapel. Artists’ recitals
have been given, which have brought before the student-body and the com-
munity some of the most distinguished soloists and lecturers of the country.
Glee clubs for men and for women receive constant attention. There is also
a University hand, which has been maintained with greater interest since
the gift of a superb set of instruments by Mr. H. C. Frick. The department
is now fairly abreast, in its personnel and equipment, of its original ideal.
It remains for the University’s constituency to give it sufficient patronage
and it will soon equal any similar department in an educational institution.
Nothing more would he needed to establish that conclusion than to know what
underlies the following ( partial) list of special talent found in the graduate
list: Miss Florida (Parsons') Stevens (now teacher and piano-virtuoso
of Chicago) 1889: Mrs. Tda (Speer) Coan (1884): D. F. Conrad ( i88f>) :
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Miss Alice M. Firestone (piano, ’87, organ, ’05) ; Miss Bessie Merz (now
teaching in New York) 1887; Emmanuel C. Zartman (now presiding over
the department of music at Tiffin, Ohio) ; Miss Anna E. Hunt (piano and
violin, ’88) ; Benjamin Welty (1890 — head of a department in the West);
Carey E. McAfee and Reno Meyer (classmates 1891); Miss Elizabeth R.
Speer (1892) ; Miss Mary Elizabeth Beer (now one of the world’s best con-
traltos) 1898; Miss Josephine Cook (1899); Miss Regina Barnes (1904);
Miss Ora M. Redett, 1906; Miss Dessa Brown (1908), with Messrs Hart and
Keim, recent tenors. Perhaps the most talented of all has been just lost
to the world, in which he promised to be among the most eminent pianists,
by sudden death — Ralph E. Plumer (organ, 1905, piano, 1906, collegiate,
1906). In the near future it is to be hoped that this department, which can be
made more useful in many ways, may share in the large endowments which
seem to be coming to the University.
6. The homes for missionaries and their children deserve an honored
place in this record. The crying need for such homes as would offer shelter
and care and education to the children of missionaries, both of whose parents
remained at work in the foreign field, was first emphasized by the Rev. Dr.
Wherry, who was marooned at Chicago by the care of his family for some
of the years which he well knew might be most fruitful for the great work
he had been compelled to leave in India. Application being made to Mrs.
William Thaw, of Pittsburg, for aid in establishing such homes elsewhere,
she saw at once the propriety, the satisfaction to those on the firing line, and
the true economy of the proposal for the church in the home land. Prefer-
ences already established for this University, because of its declared Christian
ideals, its distinctly denominational character, its central position and the
lower cost of living which prevailed here, determined her to make a propo-
sition conditioned upon the location at Wooster. The board of trustees
passed the following minutes in June, 1892: “The board recognizes with
great satisfaction the action of the executive committee in consenting to the
condition on which the proposal of Mrs. William Thaw (that generous friend
of the University and of missions) has been made, viz., to give five thousand
dollars to provide two homes for the children of foreign missionaries at
Wooster, fifteen thousand dollars to be raised in addition, and to give five
hundred dollars annually for five years to support the work, one thousand
five hundred dollars being also to be provided yearly for this purpose. To
the pledge of free tuition to the children in these homes the board freely
consents.” The properties cost, with the necessary additions and modifica-
tions, over thirty thousand dollars. Some contributions must still be made
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in the wav of maintenance. ‘‘Each child cost the Homes, for maintenance
alone/’ says the report of last year, “four dollars and forty-four cents per
week, while the amount received per week for each child’s board and home
privileges is three dollars, twenty-seven and one-half cents. This weekly
deficit was met by interest on endowment funds [the endowment is small]
and by contributions from friends. The fiscal year closed without a debt.”
The inmates of these homes are in all stages of education from primary
grades to university seniors. The Westminster family (for girls and very
young hoys) represented last year “thirteen different homes and nine dif-
ferent countries.” In the Livingstone home were “nine college men, eight
preparatory boys and three little boys in grammar grades.” It is evident at
a glance, without and within, that these homes mean comfort and kindly
care, tempered with only such control as is necessary for the safeguarding
of mutual interest and happiness. The health record is most gratifying. Not
a single death at either of the homes has occurred among the one hundred
and fifty who have been sheltered in them since 1893. The whole history of
these seventeen years has been one of blessing, and many grateful as well
as anxious hearts are turned toward these homes from the ends of the earth.
They are not local institutions. They are the property of our whole de--
nomination through its Board of Foreign Missions and they are its only
property serving this noble purpose. The University redeems its pledge of
free tuition and the church in general is providing slowly sufficient perma-
nent scholarships to enable the institution to meet this expenditure. Main-
tenance of the homes is an entirely separate matter. “No money given to
the University goes to the maintenance of the homes, or vice versa.” The
best evidence of the divine pleasure in this enterprise is found in the number
of these sons and daughters of missionaries who have returned or are pre-
paring to return to foreign fields, and generally to that one in which they
were born. These homes mean much to those for whom inevitable separa-
tion from their children must always prove one of the sharpest trials asso-
ciated with their obedience to the “great commission.”
Congenial to the work just considered, and as a kind of sequent, there has
arisen a desire to provide for missionaries on furlough so that their years
of reinvigoration might be spent with their families about them in the locality
in which their children were being educated. The first of these comfortable
houses given to meet this need was presented by Mrs. Samuel Mather, of
Cleveland, and bears the name of the “Julia Gleason Home,” in memory of
the donor's venerated mother. Mrs. Mather's unexpected death last year
was recorded with sincerest grief by the board of trustees in a minute em-
phasizing “its profound appreciation of her 1>eautiful character, her many
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and generous sacrifices for this institution and her sincere loyalty to every-
thing it represents. * * * She was like her blessed Master. * * * We cherish
her memory as sacred/’ L. H. Severance, in his recent journey through
the Orient, had occasion to notice yet more carefully than before the “anxiety
of the missionaries about to leave for America on furlough” and was moved
to provide two additional dwellings for the special purpose of allaying that
anxiety. One of them is called the “Juliana Long Home,” after his grand-
mother, the wife of Cleveland’s earliest physician. The other is named for
Mrs. Sarah C. Adams, “the first lady missionary sent out by the Presbyterian
church in Cleveland. ’’ Other dwellings will the more certainly be provided
localise a noble woman has purchased the requisite site for two or more and
has conveyed it to the University to await the building thereon bv some one
who shared the purchaser’s enthusiasm.
It is scarcely necessary to add that most of the pressure toward the
provisions just noted exists in full force for home missionaries and their
children. The University asks respectfully the same for each and more for
both.
7. The Florence H. Severance Bible and Missionary Training School
was opened September 16, 1903. It was appropriate that such a school should
find its proper attachment to the Wooster stem, for in June, 1871, at the close,
that is, of the University's first year, the board of trustees solemnly recog-
nized the endowment of a chair of Biblical instruction according to a wish
expressed and through means furnished in the will of Boyd J. Mercer, of
Mansfield, Ohio. And so, early as 1873, d was resolved that a missionary
professor should be elected “provided means could be raised to meet the
expense, before the next meeting of the board.” When Mr. Louis H. Sever-
ance introduced the proposal it was immediately resolved that “such a school
was needed and that preparations for opening this fall” should be made — if the
expense could be met. That was settled by the offer of the same generous
friend to provide for the salaries of two professors for five years. In June,
1908, in a letter to the board of deep thoughtfulness and earnestness Mr.
Severance requested that one hundred thousand dollars of the one hundred
and twenty-five thousand dollars he had just contributed to the University
should be set apart for this school and that any surplus above expenses should
become a part of the principal until the total sum of one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars should be reached. Mr. Severance expressed the conviction
that the best way to bring about world-wide evangelization was “to strengthen
Christian education to mould the ruling minds for successive generations.”
“This work,” he continues, is fundamental to the life and work of the church.
In this spirit this college was founded. It is a rare privilege to build on such a
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foundation and to aid in carrying out the purposes of the first board of trus-
tees.” Announcing his conviction that the only hope of those who sit in dark-
ness “is to hear the gospel from the lips of those that know the Word and are
striving faithfully to live it,” he could not but see that “young men and women
of our Christian colleges are needed as preachers, teachers, evangelists, lay-
workers and kindergarten leaders more than ever before." “That such young
men and women may be properly trained for this work in surroundings and at-
mosphere meet for such service, and that the work may go on for all time and
be left to no uncertainty, I donate to you the sum of one hundred thousand dol-
lars for the purpose of establishing, in loving memory of my wife, Mrs. Flor-
ence H. Severance, a permanent endowment fund for the Florence H. Sever-
ance Bible and Missionary Training School — a department in the University
of Wooster.” The trust is being carefully administered by able men. Its efifect
is not confined to those who are exclusively connected with this department.
Its varied and attractive courses are elected by numbers of regular collegiate
students, and thus the influence of Bible study and mission experience, joined
with study of fundamental truth and ingenious methods, gains larger power
constantly. “The infiltration of distinctly religious material into liberal edu-
cation at Wooster is in consequence much greater than seen in other Christian
colleges. This influence is further extended by the co-operation of other
departments.” (Nolan R. Best, Interior, May 19, To). The work of the de-
partment appeals to at least seven different classes, “(T) Those who expect
to become foreign missionaries; (2) those who design to be pastors’ helpers
in the larger cities; (3) those who intend any kind of city mission work;
(4) those who look forward to being lay missionaries in the home field; (5)
those who desire increased usefulness in any chosen sphere of activity ;
(6) those contemplating work in Y. M. C. A. or Y. W. C. A. associations;
and (7) students from foreign-speaking communities.” All the resources of
the university, so far as they can aid this work, may be freely drawn upon,
and its benefits are diffusive throughout the whole university community.
Those who have the work in charge are specially fitted for every phase of it
by home and foreign study and experience. The department would take us
deeper into the religious consciousness and progress of our race and kindle
sympathy with all religions, while accenting the infinite superiority of the
Christian system and of God’s holy word.
X. MISCELLANY.
Under this general term there must be grouped, with brief notices of
each, many matters intimately connected with the internal life of the uni-
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versity. As largely independent of each other, it will matter little in what
order they are presented.
1. The conferment of honorary degrees has been in the past (especially
in America) a much-abused college function. Judging by observation and
knowing something of the number of candidates who are pressed upon boards
of trustees, and of the motives of various kinds which facilitate the distribu-
tion of these titular ornaments, one is disposed to reckon the position of our
university as rather conservative. Including 1909, there have been one hun-
dred fifty-five degrees of Doctor of Divinity ; forty-five have been accorded the
Doctor of Laws: twenty-three have received the Doctor of Philoso-
phy ; twenty the Master of Arts and five others have been recognized each by a
little used degree. The total is two hundred forty-eight. The clergy have
profited (if it has been a profit) by more than half. I have heard of no declin-
atures save one. Looking over the printed list one cannot but note the many
really eminent men who, like good wine, needed “no bush/’ and the number of
excellent and useful men whom no title could make eminent but who will incon-
testably have won at the great assize the plaudit, “Well done/' In 1898 a
committee of the board expressed its opinion concerning the faculty commenda-
tion (a prerequisite according to the law of the university) that “we are in
danger of quite too freely distributing honorary degrees.” Later a rule has
been made requiring statements by the faculty as well as nominations and that
notification of the nominations must be made at the February meeting of the
board preceding the June meeting at which degrees are usually conferred. This
encourages the hope of the writer, and of the negligeable number of those who
hold similar opinions, that the flagrant evil of honorary degrees, though it be
now the age-long practice of the educational world, will be gradually restricted
to those who have no need of it and so disappear.
2. Interesting as other evidences of intellectual activity and moral char-
acter in a student body may be, wise observers will attach great significance to
the college publications, especially those managed mainly or wholly by students.
In this respect our university must be acknowledged to have shown enterprise
in the series reaching through The Collegian (published by the literary socie-
ties) ; the great blanket-sheet commencement editions (so full of fine character-
istic material for detailed history) ; The Voice, early among college weeklies:
The Christian College and The Wooster Quarterly, together with the annual
Index. Two of these publications were sustained by faculty and alumni, as
the Quarterly still is. Kindly co-operation of faculty and student organiza-
tions created a weekly journal (The Voice) invaluable to those who wisli to
keep in touch with the college life. The Quarterly is indispensable as an in-
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dex of the higher literary work of our graduates and by its ever-fresh “Round-
Table,*’ at which increasing numbers are coming to be guests. Much is yet
before us in the development of the real, but largely latent, power of students,
faculty and alumni in creditable literary work.
3. On the question of commencement exercises the institution has stood
stanchly by the just conception that the graduating class should form the
centre of interest. That day is their day and not to be given away to any
adventitious aid from without. The men and women who have been receiving
the training of the whole plexus of college forces are the specimens of handi-
work worth exhibiting. As the classes grew larger — and as early as 1877 — the
faculty was requested by the board to restrict the speaking to not over twelve
persons and to select these according to scholarship. Variety has been intro-
duced but all the class graduating must prepare orations and the questions of
how many shall speak and how they are to be selected are variously disposed
of as they occur. The blanket-sheets referred to, preserve so much of the
real life of the university as expressed at the great occasion of the year, that
it seems a pitv they could not have been preserved and bound in order. In
reviewing carefully many of them I have found much to admire in the subjects
chosen, the treatment given them, the constant evidence of wide-awakedness on
the substantial issues of the time and even in the innocent prodding of the
prophets and the affectionate ( ?) advice of the retiring ( ?) seniors to the
juniors whom they affected to believe were patterns of all they ought not to
be. As for stingless and good-natured college pasquinades, I would say again
that I have seen many a youth ripen under them as a good apple under the
sun — not even omitting the blushes.
4. Training in the fine art of expression has arrived at Wooster, dis-
placing the imperfect and largely artificial thing known as elocution. There
has been constant progress in this direction. J. C. Sharpe (Wooster, ’83)
was efficient. Byron King and Claude Davis and Miss De Voe and Chambers
and Strong and Dresser did good work. But the present incumbent, Delbert
E. Lean, has a university professorship to fill instead of a precarious living to
make by private pupils, as was so often previously the case. The better posi-
tion gives the work a broader basis. Training for forensic work of all kinds
is carried forward and results are seen in the local and general contests, and
especially in the vigor and power of the debating teams. Throughout the
forty years Wooster has held an honorable position in oratory and just now
seems with the successful debates and the winning work of our remarkably
intelligent and able Chinaman P. W. Kuo, to be on the top of the wave.
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5. Naturally connected with public speaking conies into view the place
and power of the literary societies. Testimonies of highest character by most
distinguished men (James Blaine, for example) give them highest rank in prac-
tical preparation for life’s work. They stimulate and develop the independent
activities of students ; they bring out talent and exhibit character ; they teach
poise and self-control; they sharpen the forensic faculties and help to discern
fallacies and to find the joints in an opponent’s harness ; they prepare for in-
fluence in all deliberative assemblies by knowledge of parliamentary law ; they
are great schools for mutual esteem and fine demonstrators of the democracy
of talent. It is a wonder and a disappointment when any hindrance to supreme
interest in their work arises. Yet Wooster has seen a very special early de-
velopment in this direction yield to periods of comparative indifiference and
partial neglect. I regret that space cannot be afforded for a careful review
of the early planting and successful operation of the odd and hardly under-
stood “Alpha,” with the permanent Athenaean and Irving and Willard, the
Lowell and Lincoln, and the later Castalian and Orio. In all of them good
work has been done ; but it remains true that still better work, and that by
larger numbers, may yet be done. At present writing there seems to be a dis-
tinct revival of interest, and at the same time a considerable energy expended
in clubs with a literary purpose, together with “Congressional.” of a political
cast, and the “Peace Association,” with its wide affiliations and humane im-
pulses. Details cannot be given, but the outlook is encouraging along the
whole line. The president's report to the synod of 1909 indicates the faculty’s
deep interest in the work of these societies: “In order to foster their work.
Friday evening has been exclusively reserved for them. The membership of
these organizations consists of one hundred ten men and one hundred eight
women.”
6. The system of prizes and honors is closely related to the literary life
of the university. This is not the place for a mature study of the problem
which such a system presents in either its intellectual or ethical relationship.
But it may well be questioned whether all forms of competition are not injuri-
ous and all forms of co-operation helpful toward the true social ideals. That
the higher motives should rule in education in view of their character-reveal-
ing and character-making power, it seems a truism to observe. In a Christian
college it would seem that all true ideals should rule and that is tantamount to
saying that delight in learning for itself; experience and power gained in study
and in communicating the resulting acquirements; the honor from without
which comes from having done well ; the honor from within with which con-
science crowns those who have done their best ; the value of every exact fact
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as a thought of God and a toon to our race ; and the supreme satisfaction of
having done all worth doing under the Master’s eye, ought to be found suffi-
cient to arouse the mind, to fix the attention, to stir the emotions and to de-
termine the will to serious and continued endeavor. The last of these great
motives or intellectual exertion might well be held first and foremost in all
institutions which bear the Christian name. The time must come, if Christ’s
kingdom is to come, when
“Only the Master shall praise and only the Master shall blame.
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame ;
But each for the joy of the working and each in his separate star,
Shall draw the thing as he sees it, for the God of things as they are.’’
Must we not have a care lest by including the lower motives we dim the
power of the higher, and open the way for the construction of inferior char-
acter.
However this may to, the historian must record the fact that here, too,
Wooster has been conservative. Neither honors nor prizes are pushed strong-
ly to the front, though both exist. They have existed in one form or another
from the opening years. Commencement honors have sometimes reached the
number of six, though now there remain but two. “Sunima cum laude,"
“Magna cum laude 99 and “Cum laude9 * are still distributed. Prizes were offered
for the early society contests. In 1875 the graduating class established the Jun-
ior Oratorical prize. In 1876 the two prize scholarships for Sophomore profi-
ciency were established on a foundation provided by Doctor Taylor. The
“trustee prizes’’ were continued for many years by annual contributions from
members of the board and were distributed to those who came out of the
preparatory department to enter the freshman class, with the highest grades.
The tost scholar in approved high schools may now receive a scholarship.
There is the annual prize of the Oratorical Association ; and that of the Peace
Association, with the new Fackler prize for debating and a prize system in
the summer school. As yet no fellowships have been established to he ad-
ministered upon a competitive basis.
7. As compared with other institutions of its own grade Wooster’s cus-
toms concerning vacations and holidays may he styled progressive. The uni-
versity has chosen the shorter period for the college year, and acknowledges
every legal holiday by suspending all class exercises. After repeated endeav-
ors to “improve” these holidays nothing is now done collectively except in con-
nection with the ecclesiastical holiday — the “Day of Prayer for Colleges.” In
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addition to the former privileges recent custom seems to have established the
elimination of two more days from the working plan, viz : “College Day” and
the “Friday after Thanksgiving.”
8. The question of dramatic representation, with or without the use of
costumes and stage accessories, was for some years agitated. It reached its
crisis in connection with class-day exercises in 1897. The board’s decision
seemed to favor a “more liberal policy,” but the synod of that year congratu-
lated the institution on having “avoided complicity with the theatre.” A
subsequent action of the board, waiving discussion, expressed “approval of the
action of the faculty in the matter relegated to it by the decision of the synod,”
and hoped that “the faculty may be united in maintaining the university’s high
standing as to the subject-matter of this part of their report.” The faculty
subsequently (I think in 1899) took action of a different character and for the
last decade dramatic representations have been freely employed by the classes
and literary societies under supervision of a “Committee on Public Occasion.”
No objection has been made, so far as known to the writer, either by the
trustees or the synod and the policy of the institution would seem to have been
permanently changed in the liberal direction.
9. Physical culture has been growing in favor as an essential in a full-
orbed education for many years — especially as the English-speaking world has
come to realize the beneficial effects of Father Jahn’s Turncxercise in Germany.
The gymnasium came to be a marked feature in college equipment. It was
realized for Wooster in 1872 so far as the building was concerned. In 1873-4
the furniture was added and work begun. The board recognized this as an
“occasion of marked interest in the progress of the university” and the students
expected good results from the practice and instruction. The out-door sports
seemed to be arranging themselves in a natural and easy manner. But there
began to be felt the pressure for intercollegiate and competitive games with
organized teams and the accompanying enthusiasm. The existing executive
tried dissuasion, but in vain. The requisite permission was given by the
faculty and the experiment begun. In the Commencement Reporter of June,
1888, large headlines proclaim the success of the intercollegiate system:
“Wooster Downs the Other Colleges” was conspicuously printed. The trial
term's success and the “determined stand taken by the students during the win-
ter term” had been the means of “arousing a college-spirit to which Wooster
has been long unaccustomed.” The students “realized the necessity of such
contests as a stimulus to athletics in general and as foci on which could be con-
centrated the attention and interest of the boys as students of the same college,
pitting their strength and skill against those of other colleges. Our faculty
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evinced a ready spirit to enter in and give the matter a fair test. * * *
What has been the result ? Can any one doubt that the experiment has been
crowned with success ?” It is declared that Wooster had probably the
champion college-team of the state and that “no noticeable detriment” had
come to intellectual work, but rather the contrary. “Above all there has been
infused through the college the belief that there is something complete and
permanent in the ties that bind the students to their Alma Mater, that as en-
thusiastic upholders of the university we are to meet and vanquish, if possible,
all competitors on the oratorical platform and on the athletic field, that when
we have long severed our relations to college life we will find our memories
clinging around our hard-fought struggles as salient points in the routine of
our student-life/’ Assurance is felt that the faculty will “enlarge the privi-
leges of the athletic association. And on the students’ side it can be pledged
that the privileges granted will be used cautiously and honorably.’'
Thus commenced what in college parlance is called “Athletics.” in the
University of Wooster. But difficulties arose and faculty conditions were
not always respected. In 1890 the board of trustees appointed a committee
“to study the whole subject of intercollegiate athletics and report next year.*'
In June, 1891. that committee reported and asked to be discharged “in view
of the fact that intercollegiate athletic contests, so far as this university is con-
cerned, have been abolished by the faculty.” Further action at the same meet-
ing is recorded as follows: “Recognizing the value of physical culture and
encouraging all proper methods of promoting it in connection with mental
training, we yet approve of the action of the faculty in regard to intercolle-
giate athletic contests, because of the loss of time and of interest in study and
the danger of demoralization involved in them.”
Discontent with this decision was expressed variously, but there seemed
reason to believe that Wooster's conservative constituency thought the struggle
worth while, and acquiescence seemed to be gaining for some years. The
gymnasium was improved and an athletic field provided just beside it ( for
inter-class games of all kinds) at considerable expense and the sacrifice of
about one hundred fine specimens of that “grove of native oaks” which the
catalogues, for so long a period, never forgot to mention.
In 1895 synod met at Wooster and urgent petitions were presented,
but that body sustained the faculty and trustees. In June, 1897. board
adopted the report of a committee which, after mentioning certain gratifying
circumstances, contained this sentence : “The commotion over intercollegiate
games has subsided and the question may be regarded as satisfactorily and
safely settled.’'
But during the winter of 1899-1900 the faculty reversed this finding and
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the board in June, 1900, recorded the following minute: “The action of the
faculty in annulling the prohibition of intercollegiate games and the measures
taken by them to so regulate the sports as to keep both the plays and the play-
ers within due bounds, and in conformity with the aims and purposes of a
Christian university, is commended and approved.” Financial aid was granted
in 1901 and 1902 and an addition made to the incidental fee in order to meet
the increasing expenses of the intercollegiate system. The board, in 1902,
considers the “present method of guarding and guiding the athletic interests
of the university’’ as “wisely devised and successfully administered. The
growth of interest in this subject seems to be, on the whole, in a healthful direc-
tion.” Further and larger grants in aid have since been made and a report
is regularly presented to the synod as to the year’s history on the arena ; and at-
tention is called to the endeavor to secure a fair class-standing for those who
compose the teams.
A comparatively recent order restores gymnastic enrollment, examina-
tions. and practice to a proportion of attention more just to their fundamental
importance. Regular class-work is required from November first to May
15th. Great care has been taken in connection with the competitive games,
to encourage clean play and courtesy toward opponents. And no Thanks-
giving Day contests have been permitted. Per contra, it cannot be doubted
that with a considerable number of students and in all colleges of the land, the
relative importance attached to athletics is disproportionate; that the system
is artificial enough to create a new group of expenses — the more undesirable
because the legitimate expenditures of the college and of the student continue
to increase. Nor can it be denied that ameliorations of certain objectionable
(not to say brutal) conditions of the game of foremost interest have not
been 'made by the faculties and trustees of our colleges (too many of whom
apologized for and accepted these conditions) except in response to convic-
tions and demands of a public not under the influence of the glamour which
college-relations have thrown about these fierce competitions.
10. The question of fraternities (including sororities) has produced in
many institutions of higher learning (and recently in secondary schools) con-
siderable agitation. Some institutions foster them and claim to find them
beneficial. Others, as the United Presbyterian, Westminster, Oberlin and
Princeton, have excluded them and evince no disposition to introduce them.
They do not exist in the Roman Catholic colleges, as far as I know. They
do not much resemble the different “corps” of a German university. In
Wooster they were formed, five of them, in the first administration (1871-3).
Others have been founded later. No detailed history can be attempted here.
(35)
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But opposition seemed to develop at once. The record of June, 1873,
shows that “a petition of fourteen alumni to suppress secret societies was pre-
sented by Doctor Taylor and was referred to a committee.” That committee’s
report was unanimously adopted, as follows : “This board agrees with the
general sentiments of the petitioners in regard to the workings of college fra-
ternities, but does not at present see the way clear to enact any prohibitory
statute on the subject. We refer the whole matter to the deliberate considera-
tion of the faculty and recommend that — as a faculty — they open a friendly-
correspondence with the faculties of other universities and colleges, with a
view to regulating and, if possible, suppressing them.” In June, 1876, Doc-
tor Taylor reported a petition from members of the preparatory department
for abolition of secret societies in the university. After discussion a com-
mittee reported a minute “in accordance with the spirit of the discussion.” It
reads thus : “While the board does not deem it necessary to enact a prohibi-
tory ordinance, they are constrained to give it as their deliberate judgment,
drawn both from experience and observation, that secret societies in colleges
are of no permanent advantage but a positive injury. They distract attention
from legitimate literary duties, cultivate a spirit of insubordination, produce
alienations among students and are a waste of time, money and energy. We
therefore earnestly advise the students of the university to refrain from any
connection with these fraternities, and the president is hereby requested to make
known this judgment of the board at the opening of each collegiate year.”
The subject came again under consideration in June. 1889. Recognizing the
fact that “great prudence and sagacity are required in dealing with questions
arising out of the relations of Greek fraternities to the university,” the board
resolves “that a committee of three be appointed to study the whole subject, to
report at the next meeting and that the faculty be requested to consider
whether any arrangement can be made bv which the meetings of fraternities
can be held in rooms of the university building and the other places of meet-
ing abandoned.” This committee reported progress a year later and was con-
tinued. There was also continuance in 1891 and in 1892. In 1893, the long
expected report was presented upon the basis of a very large correspondence.
It was discussed carefully but not placed upon the records. Tts recommenda-
tion that “no action be taken at this time” was adopted. The impression left
by the discussion was that the mind of the board was still unchanged as to
the desirability of fraternities, but unwilling to encounter the difficulties in
the wav of their removal. The supervision of them was committed to the
faculty and in 1894 a resolution was passed “that the rules adopted by the
faculty in relation to the use of the halls of the university, including the fra-
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ternity halls, are approved and the same should be kindly but firmly enforced.”
Further faculty action requiring initiations to be confined to the fraternity
halls and nothing done in such ceremonies which would expose the candidate
to bodily injury or demand anything inconsistent with his self-respect, was
subsequently taken.
Owing to various circumstances the whole question was again very care-
fully studied by the faculty in the spring of 1908. By a small majority that
body voted to allow matters to stand as they were, but refused to approve fur-
ther multiplication of the fraternal organizations or the final establishment of
chapter-houses. Appeal was made by a committee representing a large num-
ber of alumni, to the board of trustees. The result was thus recorded:
“That the board of trustees looks upon the Greek-letter fraternities in Woos-
ter as organizations whose general purposes and character are in harmony
with the aims and spirit of the university and favors their continuance and
extension under proper supervision by this board.” A committee was also
appointed which reported in February, 1909. A delegation representing an
inter-fraternal committee was also heard. Permanent chapter-houses were
permitted. Rules were established covering eligibility, initiation and its fees,
class standing of 80 to be maintained by students in chapter-houses, and notifi-
cation to the dean of all initiated members. The chapter-houses are always
to be open to visitation by the university authorities. These rules were sup-
plemented in June, 1909, placing the location of the chapter-houses in the
hands of the board of trustees and restricting invitations to eligibles shown
to be such by a certificate from the dean. This apparently final settlement
was, however, brought into question by the offer of an ever-generous patron
of the university conditioning a liberal subscription to much-desired buildings,
upon the ultimate, final exclusion of the secret societies. Action upon this
proposal at the June ( 1910) meeting of the board was postponed at the sug-
gestion of its author, who was absent from the country at the time. As a
matter of justice two petitioning associations which had taken “important and
expensive steps” under the action of 1908, were allowed. Within the last
few years four organizations have been authorized, of which two are resusci-
tations of formerly existing fraternities. Whether the oscillating pendulum
has finally reached its point of rest, it remains for the future to disclose.
11. In so young an institution in a Western state, and on a Christian
foundation, which is essentially a democratic one, it was not to he expected
that class distinctions and disturbances would find lodgment in Wooster. Real
hazing has never known tolerance here. The first president seems to have
given it the coup dc grace when it made a first appearance. He denounced its
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unfairness and its cowardice and even counseled, it is reported, the exercise
of the reserved right of self-defense to any needed extent. “Class spirit" has
sometimes sought the rough way of expression and now and then some
“rushes” have occurred. But here again the good sense of the student-body
and a determined stand taken by the faculty has freed Wooster from disgrace*
ful scenes such as were witnessed this very month in some of our Ohio and
Western colleges and universities. The principle announced here has been
that of the entire liberty of any class to adopt and wear in peace any cap or
cane, or other class insignia its fancy might dictate. The “cross-country"
connection between Juniors and Freshmen, Seniors and Sophomores has been
domesticated here, but finds expression only in banquets. “Upper-class men"
is a phrase sometimes used, but means little in the real life of the university.
The capped and gowned seniors are paid some special attention on one or two
special occasions and in being waited for in retiring from daily chapel. Plain-
ness and sincerity go well together and all artificial distinctions seem inap-
propriate in presence of the Wooster ideal, viz., that all estimates which are
worth while are based on character and conduct.
12. When we come to discipline, it is manifest that Wooster has found
support against the foreign university standard of irresponsibility for the
moral character and conduct of students — a standard far too closely approxi-
mated in some of America's larger universities and technical schools, in at
least three things — (i) the original and distinctively Christian purpose in
which the institution originated; (2) its vital connection with a denomination
as distinguished for its ethical as for its doctrinal standards; and (3) by its
carefully maintained connection with the Christian homes from which the
large majority of our students have come. Parental co-operation has always
been sought by the report system and by special correspondence. The effort
is unceasingly made to cultivate in every student an intense loyalty to the
home he represents. The old in loco parentis idea may have been modified
in some of its applications but it has never for a moment been abandoned.
Naturally the discipline has been both firm and kindly, and the result has been
that the current of the university’s life has been almost uninterruptedly placid.
The close of the first year (1871) brought special expression by the board of
trustees of “gratification at the good order, industry, and honorable conduct
which has marked the first college year." It was found necessary to have
distinct rules, of course, but these seem to have appeared for the first time in
1875. All immoralities, including profanity, were considered disciplinable
offenses. Saloons were not to be visited, nor were amusement rooms which
had saloon attachments to be entered, nor was intoxicating liquor to be taken
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to or kept in the room of any student. Public dances were not to be frequented.
Special permission is required for leaving the city to attend conventions of any
kind or to accompany an athletic team, and in granting such leave the student’s
class standing and the wishes of his parents are taken into account. The so-
called “honor” system for examinations has not been adopted — greater re-
liance having been placed upon Christian conscience. In a notable case in
1900 it was finally stated in the college paper: “The sentiment of peace and
submission to the judgment of the faculty has been gaining among the stu-
dents.”
Naturally when forms of self-government appeared in general college life
they could be appropriately experimented with in such a college community
as that of Wooster. For several years house-committees in the dormitories
for young women have been established and more recently (1908) a student
senate has been installed. It is well understood that these bodies are ancillary
and complimentary and that the faculty still holds itself responsible to the
board, the synod and the constituency of the university for the proper over-
sight of the interior life of the college community.
13. It would seem almost superfluous to mention co-education in con-
nection with Wooster’s history. At his inauguration the first president (Dr.
Lord) thanked the founders that they had adopted the plan, and gave it not
only a hearty approval but devoted a substantial portion of the inaugural to an
argument in its behalf grounded upon the most fundamental considerations
of human equality in all conditions, oneness of all in Christ and essential simi-
larity of mental endowments. He rejects with considerable feeling, the in-
timation that the presence of women would “prove a disturbing element, un-
friendly to mental concentration, and also to the vigor and efficiency of aca-
demic government.” He asserts with confidence that it would, on the con-
trary, “give powerful impulsion to mental activity and progress.” He avows
it as his conviction that “womanly presence in our colleges and universities
will conserve order, increase decorum, and in every way cherish manliness,
honor, truth and right.” The eloquent address is even prophetic. “Present-
ly young women will be trained, like young men, for our college and uni-
versity courses, and will then resort, in increasing numbers, to these higher in-
stitutions. In that day let the young men look to their laurels. Many a time
it will happen that quick, keen, flashing womanly minds will work out most
brilliantly the hardest problems, and delicate, womanly hands seize upon and
bear off in triumph the most coveted prizes.”
The policy, thus early adopted and approved, was reasserted in the cata-
logue of 1873-4 thus : “Co-education has proven decidedly successful, the num-
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ber of young ladies in attendance having steadily increased, and their relative
standing in the classes proving their entire ability, in all respects, to master
the difficulties of the college course.” Doctor Taylor (writing about 1878 in
Douglas’ History of Wayne County) says of the young women of Wooster:
“They are prepared for teachers or for an adequate appreciation of literature,
science and life in general, and are enabled to reason for themselves and act
with superior judgment, moving without embarrassment in the most culti-
vated society and fitted to adorn the highest walks in social life.” Forty years
of experience have only accented the accuracy of these assertions. It might
be surprising to some people if the records of these later years were examined
to note the number of instances in which the “honors” have gone to those
“quick, flashing womanly minds” which President Lord foresaw. Co-educa-
tion prevails in thirty-nine out of the fifty-three colleges which are recognized
as, in one degree or another, attached to the Presbyterian faith and order.
There has inevitably arisen the social question, however, and the tempta-
tion to excessive engagement in various social activities. But this yields to
sensible rules founded upon the usages of good society and restricting social
privileges only in the degree necessary to secure the quiet which conditions at
the same time health and success in meeting the requirements of the curriculum.
14. It would be of interest and value if a study of the expenses ac-
companying an education at Wooster could be made. The original purpose
included, beyond doubt, the “plain living” as well as the “high thinking,” be-
cause Wooster was designed for efficiency in connection with the rank and file
of its first, though not its only, constituency — the Presbyterians of Ohio. But
that study is now impossible for this sketch. Suffice it to sav that it has been
steadily endeavored to hold the university, with all its increasing advantages,
open to those of limited means and to those who must provide for themselves.
From these classes have come the vast majority of Wooster’s students and
from among them have emerged those by whom its records are most adorned.
The students have never paid the entire expense of their education, of course,
and the most liberal arrangements have been made in aid of various classes of
students. While expenses have increased it cannot be said that this increase
has been in proportion to the additional advantages offered or beyond the un-
avoidable increment due to higher prices in all departments of life. This
reasonable adjustment, it is hoped, will be maintained, since nothing in splendor
of equipment could compensate the university for a loss of accessibility to
those of whom we may speak as “the middle class,” the “hone and sinew” of
every democracy.
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15. There remains but one thing more in this miscellany and that may
he styled the department of propaganda, which has been inaugurated in the
administrative offices. The resources of ingenious statement, adapted to
many classes and communities, have been taxed for the presentation of Woos-
ter’s claims to consideration, patronage and contributions. Space will per-
mit the quotation of only a few titles, such as: “Why Go to College ?” “Why
Go to the University of Wooster?” “Education from the Christian Point of
View” ; “Why Should the Denominational College Live?” — which query is an-
swered in twenty-two brief sentence suggestions; “From Farm to College”;
“An Ideal Place for Self-Discovery,” are other titles in this most persuasive
literature. It unfolds the lines of opportunity in modern education and the
demands these create which an institution of the first class — Wooster s class —
must prepare to meet. It is a literature full of information, stimulus and
broad outlook. It demonstrates plainly with what ease and certainty our
constituency — aided by friends of education everywhere — can build upon the
ample foundations laid by forty years of experience and the marvelous de-
velopment of the fourth decade. May it penetrate homes and hearts without
number.
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CHAPTER XXIII.
TOWNS OF THE COUNTY.
Aside from the city of Wooster, the chief metropolis of Wayne county,
there are several good-sized towns and villages which have been mentioned
incidentally in the various township histories, but in this chapter a more ex-
tended account will be given of them.
DOYLESTOWN VILLAGE.
This prosperous village was laid out by William Doyle, after whom it
was named, on December 9, 1827, and it was incorporated August 6, 1867.
The first house was erected in the village on a vacant lot standing between
what was afterwards Mrs. Diebers and Mr. Shondel’s grocery. It was a
log house, built by William Doyle, who occupied it as a tavern, sold whisky
and allowed dancing. The first doctor was a Mr. Pierpont, who stole a
horse while on a visit in the East and was sentenced to the penitentiary. The
first election was held in December, 1866, for municipal officers.
The mayors who have served this incorporation are as follows: 1866-8,
A. H. Purcell: 1869, Moses Bugher: 1870. J. B. Weaver: 1871. J. B.
Weaver; 1872, A. H. Purcell; 1873, A. H. Purcell; 1874, W. T. Bigelow;
1875 to 1877, W. J. Bigelow*; * * * 1886 to 1890, Allen Hassing; 1890 to
1902, G.-W. Barkhamer; 1902 to 1903, John Whitman; 1903 to 1905, G. W.
Barkhamer; 1906 to 1910, B. R. Tagg.
The present officers are. Mayor, B. R. Tagg; clerk, O. B. Heffleman;
treasurer, N. R. Zimmerman; marshal, Levi Whitman; fire chief, Henry
Roth; health officer, E. Dannemiller; Councilmen, A. Gantes, J. A. Myers,
William Jenior, A. Math. M. S. Fleck, David Beal.
The village owns a large two-story town hall, and at present the public
schools are in session in it. while the new school building is being completed.
The present physicians of the towrn are Dr. A. E. Stepfield, homeopathic ;
Dr. E. R. Spencer. Dr. E. H. McKinney, allopathic; W. A. Pursell. dentist.
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THE POSTOFFICE.
The following have served as postmasters at Doylestown : William G.
Foster, from 1828 to 1847; Angus Mclntire, 1848 to 1852; Samuel Rouston,
1853 to 1856; Orrin G. Franks, 1857 to 1859; Samuel Blocker, i860 to
1867; H. A. Soliday, 1868 to 1872; Henry S. Deisem, 1873 to 1877. The
list from 1877 ls as follows: H. S. Diersem; 1883, E. S. Nichols; 1885, C.
D. Gardner; 1889, George Jackson; 1893, J- V. Hartel; 1897, George Jack-
son, who is still serving in an acceptable manner. The present office is kept
in a new building erected by the postmaster and it was first occupied on the
morning of June 5, ‘1909.
The first rural free delivery route was established out from Doylestown
in December, 1904, and the second route started in May, 1905. The length
of the former is twenty-three and one-half miles, while the latter is twenty-
four miles in length. At first the office was at Chippewa, south of town, and
was removed in 1874.
CHURCHES OF DOYLESTOWN.
That Doylestown is a worshiping people is seen by the presence of four
neat church edifices — the Methodist Episcopal, built in 1885; the Evangelical
Lutheran, built in 1867; the Catholic, built in 1877, and the Presbyterian, a
frame building, and the oldest of all edifices in the town. For more in detail
concerning these churches, the reader is referred to the chapter on Churches
of the county, elsewhere in this volume.
LODGES AND SOCIETIES.
Doylestown is the home of the following fraternities : The Odd Fellows,
the Knights of Pythias, instituted about 1880, the Royal Arcanum, Macca-
bees, Foresters, Sons of Herman. The Odd Fellows own a fine block and
lease to the Knights of Pythias order. Odd Fellowship was first established
here in August, 1854. The lodge now numbers one hundred and twelve
members. At one time there existed a flourishing Grand Army of the Re-
public post, known as J. Galehouse Post, No. 227, but owing to the death of
all but four or five comrades of the Civil war who belonged, the post was
abandoned in 1904.
INDUSTRIES AT DOYLESTOWN.
From an early day, for a town of its size, Doylestown has ever been a
lively manufacturing place. It still holds good that early-day reputation.
Among the institutions worth mentioning here, may be named the Empire
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Mower and Reaper Works, established in the fifties. Its present condition
seems flourishing for a small factory. Its president is Samuel Miller.
Of the more modern factories, may be mentioned the Buckeye Alumi-
num Company, established in 1903. coming from Quincy. Massachusetts.
Their specialty is making communion sets, which are of a rare and beautiful
design and find a ready sale in various parts of this country. W. H. Huff-
man is the president ; W. R. Miller, secretary and treasurer, with Leon Ward
as its manager. They employ about twenty-five men.
Another aluminum industry here is the comb factory, in which a num-
ber of skilled workmen are employed and they produce a fine grade of combs
for the hair. This was established by home capital in 1903-4. J. A. Myers
is the manager of the stock company.
A new concern, starting up in the fall of 1909. is the second comb fac-
tory, which produces from a Doylestown invention a superior article in way
of a fibre comb. It is dark, like rubber, but very tough and flexible. It is
operated with home capital and is incorporated for twenty-five thousand
dollars. Its president is Bert Myers.
BANKING.
The banking business is well taken care of here by the Doylestown
Banking Company, with D. J. McDaniel, president; J. W. Zimmerman,
vice-president ; George Landis, cashier. The capital of this banking company
is fifteen thousand dollars, while its deposits were, in 1909, three hundred
and twenty thousand dollars.
TOWN OF CRESTON.
This was formerly known and platted in 1865 as Saville, but when the
railway company established a town by that name elsewhere — over the county
line — this place was, for a time, called Pike Station, it being situated on the
old Cleveland pike road. But in 1881 it was changed to Creston. It is
situated in Canaan township, near the north line of Wayne county, and now
has a population of about twelve hundred. It has the following transporta-
tion lino: The Wheeling & Lake Erie line; the Erie. Baltimore & Ohio
line and the Cleveland and Southwestern, which is the electric intenrban
road, built about 1001 . from \Y<x)ster to Cleveland.
The present professional men of Creston are Doctors T. D. Ilollings-,
worth. J. W. Irvin. A. C. Kenestick, William Orr, Van I. Allen, R. T.
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Baird and G. H. Smith, dentist; Price Russell, attorney; J. E. Elliott, real
estate, loans and notary public.
The present-day industries here flourishing are The Buckeye Concrete
Company, manufacturing, in the largest plant in Wayne county, fence posts,
hitching posts, arbor posts, porch posts, water troughs, building blocks, etc. ;
Pickle and Preserving works, which is doing a good business, the owners
being Messrs. Lutz & Schramm ; Creston Hoop and Stave Company, the
most extensive works of the town; the Creston Wood Handle Company, who
make all sorts of tool handles from the native timber of the immediate
vicinity; the White Rose Creamery; D. G. Hay's roller flouring mills, etc.
The hotels of the town are the Arcade and the Hotel Creston.
The newspaper of the place is the newsy, independent paper known as
the Creston Journal , est dished in 1880 and now edited and printed by its
owner, F. M. Sulliger.
The schools of the town are held in a fine two-story frame school
building.
There are the following civic societies represented in this place; The
Masonic, Odd Fellows ‘and Maccabees orders.
The churches are the Methodist Episcopal and the Presbyterian, of
which mention is made fully in the church chapter.
POSTOFFICE.
At an early day the postoffice was kept at old Jackson, but in about
1864-5 it was established at what is now Creston. The postmasters from
the first have been as follows; Elmer St. John, serving at least eight years;
Phillip Baum, serving four years; G. W. Littel, four years; J. T. Miller,
four years; C. P. Smith, four years; N. I. McGlenn, from 1893 to 1897, ail(J
John McGuff, from 1897 to the present time. There are now two free rural
delivery routes out from this town.
INCORPORATION.
Creston was incorporated June 2, 1899; the following have served as
mayors: The first mayor was Warden Wheeler, who served until April 10,
1900, when he was followed by Price Russell, who served until April 9,
1902. Mr. Russell was succeeded by William B. Jordan, serving until Jan-
uary 31, 1906, and he was killed on the Wheeling & Lake Erie railway.
February 11, 1907. W. H. Peters took Mr. Jordan’s place and is the present
(1909) mayor.
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Two great fanning industries must not be omitted in the history of this
place. The onion farm of one hundred and thirty acres, near the town limits,
the property of Wean, Tenney & Company, where immense quantities of
best grade onions have been produced for many seasons in succession, and
where are employed scores of men and women in planting, cultivating and
harvesting, crating and shipping onions to far and near markets.
Then the Jordan Brothers immense celery farm, embracing one hundred
and fifteen acres and on which land is produced the finest variety of table
celery, which also gives employment for many persons and has come to be
sought after at far distant points, and is very profitable.
BANKING.
Creston has a good banking house, known as the Stebbins Banking
Company, its president is \Y. P. Stebbins; the cashier is C. A. Stebbins. and
assistant cashier, E. D. Arthur. Its capital is ten thousand dollars, while
the deposits are sixty-five thousand dollars. The bank occupies a fine, mod-
ern-style banking house, constructed of stone and brick.
TOWN OF ORRVILLE.
Orrville is located in Green and Baughman townships and has a popula-
tion of something over three thousand. The town owns its own water plant
and electric light plant and has recently put in a sanitary system of sewerage.
The place was incorporated in 1864 and the following have served as its may-
ors : William Gailey, 1865; William M. Orr, Alexander Moncrief, Dr. A. C.
Miller, Mahlon Rouch, J. F. Seas, S. D. Tanner, G. W. Barrett, N. L. Royer,
Warren Ramsey, Levi Neiswanger, J. M. Fiscus, Dr. Faber, George Starn,
D. F. Griffith. The present town officials are : D. F. Griffith, mayor, Charles
Arnold, marshal; A. L. Reed, clerk; F. M. Tanner, treasurer; board of public
service, Frank Reichenbach, E. C. Bowman and Ralph Kinney; councilmen,
John Kropf, Adam Fogel, H. P. Shantz, E. E. Schrantz, E. P. Willaman, H.
P. Leickheim.
Orrville was named in honor of Hon. Smith Orr. The town has an ex-
cellent town hall, a brick building, of two stories, with town offices and engine
rooms attached.
The accompanying reminiscences will give the reader a fair compre-
hension of the wav this place was started and will prove interesting, as well.
There are four churches in Orrville and the Catholics expect to build soon.
The present churches are the Presbyterian, Methodist Episcopal, Reformed
and English Lutheran denominations (see church chapter elsewhere for this
and other towns in Wayne county).
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The fraternal societies of the town are the Masonic, Odd Fellows, Royal
Arcanum, Knights of Honor, National Union and Maccabees orders.
The physicians are Doctors Blankenhous, Brooks, Campbell, Grady,
Irvin and Shie.
A postoffice was established at this point in 1863-64 and the postmasters
who have served came in the following order: Alexander E. Clark, J. F.
Seas, David L. Moncrief, Henry Shriber, J. W. Hostetter, Proctor Seas,
Henry E. Taylor, G. D. McIntyre.
In 1902 there were two free rural delivery routes established out from
Orrville, and in 1905 two more.
There are two excellent school buildings — one erected in i860 and one
dedicated in 1908, a fine structure.
The town has the distinction of owning its excellent equipped electric
lighting plant and its wrater works, which were installed in the nineties. The
water works were put in in 1897 and derive the best quality of drinking water
in Ohio from four tubular wells sunk to the great depth of eight hundred feet.
Drinking fountains for man and beast are found on the principal streets.
With paved streets and good sewers, electric lights and an abundant supply
of the purest water, the place is fast putting on “city airs.”
The town is well advertised and is served with the latest news bv twro
good local newspapers, spoken of in the Press chapter — the Crescent and
Courier.
The attorneys of Orrville at this date are S. N. Coe and Ryer & Starn.
The commercial hotel of the place is an excellent one and is styled The
Hurd.
A Board of Industry keeps seeking out additional business firms and fac-
tories for Orrville. Its secretary is now Charles Craft.
The railroad interests are very extensive at Orrville. The companies
here represented are the Pennsylvania lines ; the Wabash ; the Cleveland, Akron
& Columbus of the Pennsylvania system. The latter road has its division
and machine shops at this point and it is rumored that soon a great enlarge-
ment of the Pennsylvania. Pittsburg. Ft. Wayne & Chicago, w ill be made here,
in way of shops and division interests.
ORR VI ELK'S INI >U ST R I KS .
Orrville is the home of the following factories and industrial interests:
The Orrville Milling Company’s roller mill, in which the daily capacity is about
eight hundred barrels. This was established in the early seventies as a bulir-
stone mill, hut was later changed to a full roller-process flouring-mill. Other
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industries are the mattress factory; the Champion thresher factory; Cottage
Creamery, a branch of the Sugarcreek Creamery, established here in 1909;
the Cyclone Drill Company, that manufactures many kinds of drills and coal
mining and well machinery and employs more than forty men ; the C. C. Haff-
ner harness factor}' ; Orrville Bed Spring Company ; the Iron Hand and Power
Pump factory, a new concern that promises much in the near future to Orr-
ville; the Gemill phonograph factory, making an invention of the place a
profitable industry, and many lesser factories.
The first move toward putting in electric lights was by the ordinance
passed February 1. 1892, when the scheme of providing for light, heat and
power was inaugurated.
The Orrville board of water- works trustees was organized April 16.
1894. as follows: D. F. Griffith, A. H. Postlewait and C. C. Davidson.
It may be well to give a list of some of the more important factories that
have from time to time been located here — in fact the citizens here have al-
ways tried to keep a line of paying industries going. Many have long since
dropped from the list, moved elsewhere or gone out of business entirely.
January. 1877, a patent was granted to Mr. Askins for a glass coffin; a
joint stock company was formed to make the same and two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars was subscribed. Five men were employed. The presi-
dent of the company was William M. Orr. D. G. Horst, treasurer, and Jacob
I.. Askins, superintendent.
The Orrville Planing Company was organized in 1867 with a joint-stock
of twenty thousand dollars; it finally passed to Joseph Snively.
A hand-rake and fork manufactory was established here by Boydston &
Ramsey, in 1871. and did a splendid business.
The Orrville Pottery was established in 1862 by Amos Hall and Robert
Cochran, who sold it in 1877 to Kckert and Flickengcr. who made immense
quantities of crocks, jugs, fruit jars, etc.
File Orrville Tannery was established in 1864, by Ludwiek Pontius, and
was the first industry of its kind in Orrville.
HANKING.
1 he Hxchange Bank was established here in 18B8, by Jacob Brenneman
and David Hoist. It was later styled Brenneman & Horst's Bank.
1'he Orrville National Bank was organized with forty thousand dollars
capital, and now has deposits amounting to three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars. Its present officers are H. IF Strauss, president; Isaac Pontius, vice-
president; F. F. Strauss, cashier.
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ORVILLE BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR.
[Xote — In the year 1890 two citizens, J. F. Seas and D. G. Evans, were
conferring on the matter of holding a reunion of those who were residents of
Orrville in 1860. W. S. Evans happened to drop in from Michigan, enroute
to Tennessee, while the matter was being considered, and was asked to pre-
pare a paper on his recollections to be read at the proposed meeting. The re-
union did not materialize, but the paper was later published ( Courier , July
22, 1890) and reads as follows:]
The spring of i860 found Orrville a small unincorporated village with a
population of probably five hundred inhabitants. As nearly as I can recollect
tlie business interests of the place were represented as follows : Fischer Bros,
and M. Whitmyer, groceries: Bailey & Evans, drugs and groceries; David
Mast, dry goods: Reaser, Skelton & Burkholder, dry goods; J. F. Seas, post-
master and hardware; D. L. Moncrief, drugs; Fletcher Brothers, harness;
Philip Krick, shoemaker; Mr. Hart, shoemaker; Reaser Brothers, blacksmiths;
Munn & Lefever, cabinetmakers and furniture; Kirk Johnson, miller; Jerome
Ammann, cooper; S. K. Kramer, grain dealer; Gailey & Herr, grain dealers;
George Brown, tailor; James Postlewait, wagonmaker; Joel Levers, cabinet-
maker; J. B. Heffleman, tinner; Hy Smith tinner; Joseph Snavelv, saw-mill;
J. C. Speicher. American House, with the characteristic Joseph Wiley as chief
clerk and guest solicitor at all passenger trains ; A. E. Clark, physician
At that time we had two railroads, the Pittsburg & Ft. Wayne and the
Cleveland, Zanesville & Cincinnati, now the Cleveland. Akron & Columbus.
John McGill was the agent for the Adams Express Company, as also for the
Union Express on the Cleveland, Zanesville & Cincinnati railroad. C. N.
Storrs was agent for the Cleveland, Zanesville & Cincinnati road, with
Patrick Cuinlan as baggage master. Henry McGill was baggage master
for the Ft. Wayne road, with Thomas McGill as night watch. The
switch engine for transferring cars from one road to another in those busy
days was a yoke of large oxen engineered by “old Kennedy.” whose highly
musically toned voice could be heard incessantly, “Git up Buck, go on Berrv.“
One clay one of the oxen became sick and John McGill telegraphed to the
master of transportation at Alliance that there would be some delay in handling
cars, because the switch engine burst a fine and wanted a man sent clown at
once .to repair it. Mr. Kennedy also controlled the d raying business and car-
ried the mail. John D. McNulty was telegraph operator in the office opened
bv the Ft. Wayne railway during the latter part of the year 1859, and W. S.
Evans was a student and messenger bov about the office. At that time Orr-
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ville enjoyed a train service on its two roads which was exceedingly con-
venient and accommodating to the citizens of the place, and in one respect more
seasonable in hours than at any other station point on the road between Pitts-
burg and Chicago, in the fact that at any other station on the road there were
no more passenger trains earlier than 7 A. M.. nor later than 9 P. M., afford-
ing good opportunities to go to Wooster and return twice or three times a day.
and to Cleveland and return between 7 A. \1. and 7 P. M. The whistle of a
locomotive engine on Sunday would have been as much of an innovation as the
opening of business houses on that day would at present. The American
House was the only hotel in the place, and in consequence enjoyed a pros-
perous patronage under the management of mine host. Jacob Speicher. who
frequently entertained his guests with vivid tales of valorous deeds and sin-
gular experiences in good old Pennsylvania style, amongst which was the un-
paralleled feat of taking up a well and moving it across the road. The Amer-
ican was a popular house. In i860 there were but three brick buildings in the
embryonic city of W ayne, and they were the residences of John McGill,
Brenneman & Horst's store building and the residence of C. X. Storrs. south
of the town hall. There were no buildings south of the Ft. Wayne tracks
except a few Irish shanties and an old warehouse, and the residence of Kin-
ney Harris, a small opening in the woods, about where the fine residence of
Mrs. Jacob Brenneman now stands. Fast of Main street was a body of
woodland, which came up as near the village as the present location of the
coffin factory. West of that street and south from where the tracks and depot
of the Wheeling railroad now are, was a stumpy pasture field so swampy in
the spring time that a cow could not pass through it without becoming mired.
From Church street north and east of Main street, the only buildings between
the first-named street rnd the C. Z. & C. railroad were the school house be-
tween the present site of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches and the
residence of Mr. Postlewait on the hill. In the spring of i860 there was not
a foot of stone or brick sidewalk in the entire village. D. G. Evans putting
down the first stone walk in front of the present Boiling bakery building ( now
the Orrville National Bank).
There was only one church building in the place. The present Reformed
church was known as the I'nion church, and was used on alternate Sundays
by the Methodists and Presbyterians, the ministers coming from Dalton to
conduct the services. There w as no resident minister in the place during that
year, although there had been one or more previous to that time. The school
was about the same as any ordinary district school. There was no bakery.
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planing-mill or factory of any kind, no dentist, lawyer or photographer, no
regular saloon, no mayor, council, marshal, yet there was very little rowdyism
or unlawful disturbance in the absence of these minions of the law. We had
no bank to take care of our money for us, and in fact none of us were very
much burdened with the safe-keeping of the filthy lucre!
Neither did we have the advantage of that great leverage which booms
the wonderful future of a western town before an astonished public, and to-
day proclaims a prosperous city, where yesterday stood and howled the coyote
and prairie wolf — the printing press and newspaper. If we wished to make
our greatness known, it had to be done by word of mouth from stumps or
housetops, and the stumps were more plentiful than housetops in those days.
In the summer of i860 we had the memorable campaign which preceded
the great Rebellion and made Abraham Lincoln President. Our Republican
Wide-awakes, under the command of Captain Gift, with their torches and oil
cloth capes, with a spread eagle painted on the back (humorously dubbed a
mad goose by Father Seas), divided the honors of displaying their patriotism
with a singularly uniformed company of Democratic sprouts who marched
as proudly and shrieked as loudly for their candidate, Stephen A. Douglas, the
little giant of the West. Although the campaign was an unusually hot one,
it was passed through without much bitterness or personal animosity. One
day during a Republican meeting, a bombastic telegraph repairer from Mans-
field was brought up from the station by McNulty and Henry McGill, given a
few drinks, and urged by them to deliver an opposition speech. He accepted
the invitation with alacrity, rolled a drygoods box into the street, mounted it
and began his harangue. Engineer Brown coming along at that moment,
listened a minute to what the spouter was saying, concluded that his utterances
were not in strict accord with the spirit of Republican meetings, calmly walked
up and knocked the fellow off the box, which seemed to put a decided damper
on whatever aspirations the embryonic political speaker had previously enter-
tained. The occurrence amused the Democratic people as much as it did the
Republicans.
Thirty years ago there was not a pound of coal burned in Orrville except
that used by the blacksmiths. Even the engines on the railroads burned wood,
and Orrville was one of the most important points on the line for supplying
fuel.
Thirty years has wrought many changes in our town and its people.
Many of our friends and acquaintances have scattered to various portions
of this and other countries, and many, yea, very many, have been called to
(35a)
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their last resting place and final reward. What the next thirty years will
bring to probably a majority of us is not a matter of conjecture, and it be-
hooves us to prepare for that greater and final reunion where there will be
nothing but pleasant reminiscences to recount.
AN ORRYTLLE REMINISCENCE.
The following was extracted from the Orrville local newspaper at the
time Father James Taggart had just passed his ninetieth birthday, in 1907:
James Taggart passed his ninetieth birthday Tuesday, October 1, 1907.
He is no doubt the oldest resident born within the sound of the workshops of
Orrville. His father, Samuel Taggart, located on the quarter section of land
now occupied by the southeast part of Orrville, April 9, 1815, where James
Taggart w as born in a log cabin October 1, 1817.
In an interview with Mr. Taggart he gave the following history of his
ancestry, in which he stated that John Taggart, William Taggart and James
Taggart, three brothers, came from Antrim, Ireland, just before the outbreak
of the Revolutionary war, in which war they all enlisted and served the whole
seven years. James, the grandfather of the subject of this thrilling remi-
niscence, was too young to enlist as a soldier when the war first broke out and
so for a time he served as a wagon boss. His grandfather built a log cabin
in the fall of 1814 and came out from Pennsylvania the next spring, together
wdth a number of other families, and James* father occupied the cabin. At
that period a good many emigrated to this neighborhood and located between
here and the state road, among them being the Harrises, Careys, Thompsons
and Adamses. Rev. Adams was the first preacher, and a church was built on
what was formerly known as the Samuel Snavely farm, three miles to the
south. There was then only a path through the woods and every man who
attended church or went away from home carried a trusty rifle to protect
himself from wolves, bears, wild cats, wild hogs and other wild beasts. The
government paid a premium of two dollars on wild hogs, two dollars on
wolves and four dollars on bears, and the farmers clubbed together to kill
them.
The state road those days from Massillon to Wooster was scarcely more
than a narrow wagon road through the woods. The nearest mill was two
miles west of Canton, until the Beason Stibbs mill was erected at Wooster.
W hen Mr. Taggart's father located here there were Indians of the Wyan-
dot tribe in this neighborhood. Punch and John Jonneycake and one other.
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Johnny Appleseed, a noted character in those days* who planted appleseeds
all over the country and from which the first orchards were obtained, traveled
through this section of the country. Punch was a vicious Indian and he sud-
denly disappeared one night. His bones were afterwards found and it is
supposed he was killed by one of the settlers. The marks of his tomahawk
were visible on numerous beech trees for many years. He gave an account of
a thrilling fight between a man and a bear in which his father was a participant.
A man named Clouse was a tenant on the Taggart farm and lived in a log
cabin situated at a spring now known as the mill pond on Paradise street. He
was a tanner by occupation and a fearless hunter and tanned the hides for
all the farmers far and near. In the fall of the year Samuel Taggart went to
Wooster to pay his taxes and during his absence two bears came into the yard
and carried off a hog. On returning home Mr. Taggart consulted with Mr.
Clouse and they started out with the dogs in search of the bears. They came
across one of them near the site of the Orrville flour mill. Mr. Taggart wanted
Clouse to shoot the bear, but he wanted to kill it with the dogs. He always
carried three butcher knives in his girdle and in the midst of the fight between
the dogs and the bear Clouse rushed in and stabbed the bear until it fell dead,
Mr. Taggart in the meantime holding the animal by the ears.
The first house built in Orrville was erected by William Bowman, who
came to the vicinity with a saw-mill about 1851 or possibly 1852. It was lo-
cated west of the mill about 1851, perhaps on the corner where the office now
stands. William Gailey built the second house on the corner of Walnut and
Market streets on the site of the one built later by Stella and Nettie Gailey,
and the original building stands on the north part of the lot. Then old Mr.
Seas’ father became a resident of the little hamlet and built a house on the
Beckley & Strauss corner. He was followed by Clark & Hoover, of Dalton,
who opened up a store on the Evans lot, now occupied by Dr. Shie. From that
time on Orrville continued to grow and grow and grow, until now we are able
to say we are some, and some day we may be the county seat of Wayne
county. Who can tell ?
Mr. Taggart is getting quite feeble and suffers from infirmities received
in his younger days, but he has a remarkable memory and is a quiet and in-
offensive citizen. At one time he was quite wealthy, but lost his means many
years ago through his generosity of heart to friends.
VILLAGE OF SHREVE.
Shreve, incorporated in December, 1859, is located in the southeast part •
of Clinton township and was originally known as Clinton Station, but when
incorporated the name was changed to Shreve. It was named in honor of
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Pioneer Thomas Shreve, who came to the county in 1817 and settled in Clinton
township in 1821. Shreve was made by the coming of the railroad, and has
always been a good town or village. The north portion was laid out by D.
Foltz and George Stewart and the south part by Thomas McConkey and D.
K. Jones — ten acres on each side of the track, but it has long since extended
far beyond these limits. It now has a population of about fourteen hundred.
The first sale of lots was in March, 1853. The first lots in the village were
purchased by D. K. Jones and on them he erected a store room and residence.
The first building built in the place was a two-story frame house, erected by
Neal Power in 1853. D. K. Jones was the first postmaster after the office
was moved to the new village, but Thomas Shreve had been postmaster some
years before while the office was at his house in the country near by. D. K.
Jones also had the first dry goods store. Christian Roth had the first hotel.
The first doctor was W. Battles, M. D., who located here in 1853. James
Number’s was the first child born in the place, and the first \voman that died
was Miss Barbara Muterspaugh.
VILLAGE OFFICERS.
The following have served as mayors of Shreve, the first election being
held at the old hotel March 10, i860, resulting as follows: Mayor. V. D.
Manson ; recorder, William M. Knox ; trustees, D. K. Jones, John Robison,
Joseph Dyarman, James Taylor and William Johnson. 1861, mayor, Abra-
ham Tidball; 1862, Henry Everly; 1863, William J. Bertolett, M. D. : 1864,
Z. Lovett; 1865, V. D. Manson; 1866, V. D. Manson; 1867, Elmer Oldroyd;
1868, John Pomeroy; 1869, J- H. Hunter: 1870, W. J. Bertolett; 1871, C.
M. Kenton ; 1872, John Robinson ; 1873, John Robinson ; 1874, John Williams ;
1875, John Williams; 1876, Daniel Barcits; 1877. Daniel Barcus; 1878. Mi-
chael Boothe; 1879, John Hughes; 1880, William Barry; 1881. John Will-
iams; (record lost bv fire for few years) : 1894-96, Charles Wilent; 1896-98,
E. G. Oldroyd; 1898-1902. E. D. Bruce; 1902-03, John M. Moore: 1903-06,
G. Critchfield ; 1906-08. A. P. Merkle; 1908-10. O. D. Bruce.
The present town officers are: Mayor, O. D. Bruce; councilmen, Frank:
Denny, Arthur Campbell. Joseph Biggs, Julius Gleitzeman, David Cornelius.
P. E. Miller; clerk, Janies H. Bonham; marshal. William Priest; treasurer,
Wilev Miller.
Sh reve has had a good system of water works since 1893. The tubular
well system is employed and the water is now being pumped to a reservoir on
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the hill to the north of the town. The quality of water is excellent and in
abundance for both fire protection and domestic uses.
Electric lights have been the illuminating process in the village since 1895,
when E. K. Gardner installed a plant and conducted it as the only one there
until about 1891, when a company of citizens formed a stock company and in-
stalled a new plant, and both are now operating. Quite a local fight was got-
ten up over this new plant, and Mr. Gardner persisted in running and is today
furnishing light for the streets of Shreve at a mere nominal sum.
THE POSTOFFICE.
As -il ready noted, the postoffice was at first in the country and known as
Clinton, but with the building of the village it was transferred to Shreve. The
postmasters serving have been as follows : Thomas Shreve, D. K. Jones,
Albert Richardson, William Knox, Peter Housel, W. W. Wise, S. M. Robin-
son, Peter Housel, R. S. Critchfield.
The rural free delivery system was put in operation from Shreve in
1902 and now four routes run out from the place.
CHURCHES AND LODGES.
Shreve is well supplied with churches and lodges. There are lodges of
the Masons, Knights of Pythias, Maccabees and Modem Woodmen of
America, all thriving at this date. See Lodge chapter in this work.
The churches, which are spoken of at length in the Church chapter, are
the Methodist Episcopal, Christian and Presbyterian.
The professions are represented in Shreve as follows : Attorney, L. G.
Cornell; physicians, I. H. Hague (retired), R. C Paul, H. B. Bertolett and
E. M. Funk. The dentist of the place is Dr. H. C. Graham.
The banking is well cared for by two substantial banks, the Farmers’
Bank and the Citizens’ Banking Company.
INDUSTRIAL CONCERNS.
While Shreve has never laid claim to being a factorv village, yet one finds
a lively interest in the following producing plants : The roller flouring mills
of D. E. Foltz & Son; two gram elevators; one creamery; one newspaper, the
News; one boot and shoe store; two drug stores; one jeweler; five groceries;
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one general store; one exclusive dry goods store; one exclusive clothing store:
one commercial hotel, the Carr; two millineries; one photograph gallery: one
monument work shop: one livery; one auto livery; one harness shop; two
blacksmiths ; two furniture stores ; three hardwares ; two meat markets ; one
barber shop
VILLAGE OF WEST SALEM.
West Salem was platted by Peter and John Rickel. June 14, 1834. It
was incorporated in 1868. It is situated in the extreme northwest corner of
Wayne county, in Congress township. It now has a population of seven hun-
dred within the limits proper and about seventy-five just without the corpora-
tion limits. It is lighted by a system of gasoline lamps that are almost if not
equal to electricity in illuminating power. This plant was put in in 1909.
The place is served bv a semi-volunteer fire department, of which the twenty-
six members, all business men, receive the nominal sum of five dollars per year.
The water is secured from fourteen large street cisterns; the apparatus for
fighting fire consists of hook and ladder trucks, one thousand feet of hose
and chemical fire extinguishers.
About 1900 a fine large brick “city hall,” two stories high, was erected
by bonding the city. The debt is now' about all paid. This building cost
about fourteen thousand dollars and the upper story is used for opera hall
purposes, under a local manager.
MAYORS AND TOWN OFFICERS.
Since the village was incorporated, the mayors have been as follows : D.
H. Ambrose, 1868: David Mitchell, 1869; E. McFadden, 1870; John Shank,
1871 ; John Shank, 1873: John W. Read, 1874, John W. Read, 1875; James
Jeffrey, 1876. Then came E. W. McFadden and D. C. Eckerman; John
Wiley, 1898-90; Eli Rupert, 1890-93: J. H. Wiley, 1903, and still serving.
The town officers in 1909 were: Mayor. J. H. Wiley: clerk, John Pat-
terson; treasurer, F. L. Berry; marshal, John Rhodes; coitncilmen, O. I.
Wiley, E. B. Pfostetler, William Taylor, L. V. Patterson and William Salem.
POSTAL HISTORY.
There were established two rural free delivery routes out from West
Salem in 1902 and three more added in 1904. The length of each route is
twenty-five miles.
From the time the office was established, in Civil war days, John Hennv
was postmaster for many years. Following him came the following gentle-
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men: 1882-86, James Stephenson; 1886-90, Joseph Kipinger; 1890-94, James
Stephenson; 1894-98, Captain Mitchell; 1898 to present date (1909) Tom J.
Smith.
The professional men of the village at this time are : Drs. J. W. Fer-
guson, E. C. Radebaugh and G. C. Smith, medical doctors ; Dr. R. C. Wallace,
dentist; S. T. Topper, veterinary surgeon; attorneys, J. V. Keller and Grant
Goshorn ; real estate dealer, I. N. Mann.
VARIOUS INDUSTRIES.
The Greeley Milling Company does an extensive flouring business, being
located just outside the town corporation limits. This mill was originally an
old-fashioned buhr-stone mill, but was later changed to a roller mill and in
1903 was equipped with the latest flouring-mill process of roller milling, since
which time it has been doing an excellent business.
The retail trade of West Salem is represented as follows : One dry goods
and furniture store, one dry goods and millinery, one general store, three shoe
stores, two exclusive grocery stores, one clothing store, two hardware stores,
two drug stores, one meat shop, two harness shops, two restaurants, one hotel,
two liveries, two exclusive millineries, one grain elevator, one jeweler, one
lumber dealer, one coal dealer, one tile factory, one pool room, one bakery and
two barber shops, one newspaper, the Reporter.
CHURCHES AND LODGES.
The churches are the Presbyterian, worshiping in a neat brick, modern-
built edifice, with a membership of about fifty.
The Methodist Episcopal still worship in the frame building erected in
1871, but which was remodeled in 1907.
The other church is the Evangelical, an account of which will appear in
the Church chapter in this volume.
The lodges of a secret order are as follows : The Masonic, the Independ-
ent Order of Odd Fellows and the Maccabees.
OTHER INTERESTS.
The schools of West Salem have long been the pride of the place. In
1878 a large brick building was constructed at a cost of thirty-five thousand
dollars, which with some repairs is still doing good service. When built it
was known as the best school house in Wayne county, save the ones at Wooster.
The town is supplied with two good banks and is on the Cleveland &
Southwestern electric railway line, as well as on the Erie steam railroad line.
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BIOGRAPHICAL
HON. LYMAN R. CRITCHFIELD.
Hon. Lyman R. Critchfield, ex-attorney-general of Ohio, who forms the
subject of this notice, was born May 22, 1831, at Danville, Knox county,
Ohio, son of Reuben Trautman Critchfield, a native of Virginia, and Nancy
Caroline Hardesty, a native of Maryland; his great-grandfather, Nathaniel
Critchfield, who was in the Revolutionary war, and his maternal grandfather,
Henry Hardesty, were farmers. His father moved from Danville to Millers-
burg in 1834, where he served as justice of the peace several years.
Mr. Critchfield was educated in the Millersburg public schools and the
Ohio Wesleyan LTniversity at Delaware, Ohio, from which institution he
graduated, receiving the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts.
At the age of twenty-one years he entered the law office of Hon. George E.
Pugh, Columbus, Ohio, who was at that time attorney-general of the state.
In 1853 he was admitted to the bar by the supreme court and immediately
thereafter began practicing at Millersburg. He practiced six years in Cleve-
land and for the last eighteen years has been practicing in Wooster, Ohio.
His brother, Leander Jerome Critchfield, was an eminent lawyer of this state
and was for a time reporter to the supreme court. Besides practicing in the
supreme courts of Ohio. Mr. Critchfield practices in the federal, district and
circuit courts and supreme court of the United States at Washington. He
was elected prosecuting attorney of Holmes county, Ohio, in 1859, and re-
elected in 1861, resigning in 1862 when he was elected attorney-general, serv-
ing one term from 1863 to 1865 and was nominated for a second term in
1864, but was defeated with the party ticket. In 1865 he was elected to the
state senate, served one term and resigned. Among other public offices he has
held are, school director of Millersburg and also president of the council of
the city of Wooster.
Politically, Mr. Critchfield is an ardent Democrat, and gives most thought
to the strict construction and practice of the federal and state constitutions,
and especially to the rights of the people reserved in these instruments. In
1868 he was nominated for Congress by the Democrats in the district com-
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posed of Holmes, Wavne. Ashland. Lorain and Medina counties. In 1887
he was nominated for judge of the supreme court of Ohio by the Democratic
party in convention at Cleveland; in 1888 he was again nominated for the
same position at the convention held at Dayton.
O11 October 2, 1854, Mr. Critchfield was married to Adelaide Margaret
Shaffer ; their children are : Edith ; Grace ; Henry, the doctor ; Mary ; Blanche ;
Lyman, Jr., the lawyer; and Nellie. He of whom this is written is a mem-
ber of the Masonic fraternity and also of the Methodist Episcopal church at
Wooster, Ohio, where his law office is also located.
In Ben Douglas’ “Wayne County Lawyers,” a volume published recently,
the author pays this tribute to Mr. Critchfield:
“As one of the leaders of the Democratic party and foremost thinkers
in that organization, he has fought congressional battles, handicapped from
the outset with disaster-boding majorities, which, however, never abated his
ardor or enthusiasm in the conflict. * * * Whether in county, judicial,
congressional, state or national campaigns, he is ever ready with his service
for his party organization. Wherever he goes he is greeted with enthusiastic
audiences as an attractive, aggressive, fluent, logical and masterful champion
of the principles of his party.
“To the active practice of the law, when he entered upon its complex
duties and responsibilities, he brought the qualifications and forces of a drilled,
disciplined and brilliant intellect. He did not enter the list unarmed, or ill
equipped, to be battered, bruised and mangled in an unequal contest with the
grim old veterans of the then Wooster and northern Ohio bar. His force and
effectiveness is strongly emphasized in his arguments to the jury, as he seems
not so much to look at them, as to look through them, less for the purpose of
seeing how they feel, than to rivet their attention, — as it were to grasp their
minds by the compass of his own. The calm and masterly manner in which
he dis]X)ses of the preliminary considerations, is the reminder of the experi-
enced general, quietly arranging his forces and preparing to press down in
overwhelming force upon a single point. His manner becomes arodsed; his
action animated. In the careful construction of sentences, nice choice of
words, musical balancing of phrases and marshalling of arguments, he has
no superior, if indeed an equal, in Ohio.”
Mr. Douglas further says, in illustrating his subject: “These qualities
greatly aid the speaker in winning his way at the outset in the hearts of those
whom he is addressing, and in preparing them to receive his ideas and argu-
ments. When arguments are flounced in scholarly language such as Mr.
Critchfield seldom fails to employ and illustrated by beautiful figures of
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speech, the impression produced is apt to be as deep and enduring as that
made by a more phosphorescent, florid, fervid and tempestuous style of ora-
tory. Stepping aside to the consideration of him outside of his profession,
he has an imagination of distinctly diversified and comprehensive acquisitions;
as was said of Whipple, the prince of our American essayists, ‘he is an ency-
clopedia individualized and is familiar with history, science, art, agri-
culture, geology, theology, poetry, and what is desirable to know/
“To whatever subject his attention may be called, though it be one which
you would suppose to be utterly strange to his thoughts, he is enabled upon
the slightest meditation to impart an interest, a glow of life, a surprising il-
lumination; in this respect Mr. Critchfield’s intellect is similar to that of
Guizot, of whom it was said : ‘No one could surprise him, but from whom
you never failed to receive instruction/
“With his legal learning, his accurate conceptions of the law, his power
and supremacy as an advocate, his adroitness in argument, his incisive logic,
his tact and foresight in the examination of witnesses and the analysis of
testimony, his historical equipment and classical style, his measured sentences
properly emphasized to give the intended force to his language, he rapidly
rose to be one of the formidable, forensic gladiators of the Ohio bar. To
the court he is ever courteous, respectful and dignified; in contentions with
opposing counsel, cautious without being timid, resolute, but not rash, firm,
but not obstinate; to the jury he administers a common sense philosophy of
the law, the simple deductions of reason, a harmonious and symmetrical array
of facts, and this in a brilliant, rapid, piercing way ; not like the eye of Cy-
clops, letting in a flood of rushing and furious splendor, but a Drummond
light, illuminating without impairing what it shines upon. He has philosophy,
the faculty and facility of presentation, volume and elasticity of expression,
picturesqueness of imagination, and almost poetical brilliancy, which invests
his qualities with width and breadth and fascination peculiarly his own. He
collects his illustrations from the fields of nature and art, and levies contribu-
tions on literature and science. Everything in his manner and matter be-
trays the sinew and strength of the orator, the tone of his voice, the curve and
sweep of his arm, the splenetic glance of his eye, the burning scorn, the
blazing indignation; the cogency and force of his arguments, the inevitable
force of his retortion and the nervous vigor of style of a Canning.
“His prepared orations, addresses and readings are completed with
severest care. As a sculptor chisels down and finishes his statue, chipping
and clipping away the stone to find within his beautiful ideal, so it is he elab-
orates his thoughts until they assume the shapes he would give them. His
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literary tastes are pure and their products rank with the most finished emana-
tions of Whipple. Everett, Sumner, Wirt or Curtiss. They might be en-
titled to the appellation of prose poems, for he has the poet’s divine insight.
He has a ready appreciation of the proprieties of language, thought and man-
ner, as established by the usages of society, and a refined sympathy with the
sentiments of the purest intellects. In him we see the human mind in many
of its exalted aspects; there is so much of man forced into it that it appears
in fine proportions. He is the kindest and tenderest of men; loved his wife,
and in his memoriam of her is the passion of Petrarch and the consuming love
of Abelard. He is attached to his family and friends, and loves his country
with an affection that is felt in his heart, and which dilates his individuality
to the size of a national individuality.
“Upon all appropriate occasions he champions not only the noble, but
the noblest of principles within his knowledge. Mr. Critchfield not only
possesses the endowment of superior mental qualities, but of the heart equally
and assuredly so. In this connection, the sentence of St. Beuve, in one of
his memorable essays on Pascal, may with appropriateness be quoted : ‘He
is good, and great in heart and mind, which strong minds not always are;
and all he did in the sphere of the mind and the sphere of the heart, bears
the stamp of invention and originality, which attests the force, depth and
an ardent mind, so to speak, ravenous in pursuit of investigation and truth.’
“He is an admirer of the elegancies of art. This passion is innate with
him, and it is a child of his religious instinct; because the highest and best
works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music have been
derived out of an imagination of nature at whose shrine he is a worshipper.”
MRS. ADELAIDE M. CRITCHFIELD.
The beautiful subject of this sketch, the wife of Hon. L. R. Critchfield.
departed this life October 6, 1895. As of all beautiful women, the elegance
of her personality is indescribable, — a composite glow of vital forces. All
her sacred vitality, so beautifully manifested, so lovely to contemplate, flashed
its last electric grace, beamed its last auroral flushes, and one more of the
reproachless, innocent martyrs of earth, an adornment of her race, returned
to the God who gave her, in a last and crowning act of sacrifice. Around
such a life, so terminated, there were exceptional manifestations of public
regard ; eulogies, both public and private, were spoken of her, as a lady of rare
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attainments and attraction in society; as a leader in benevolences, and in
religious influences, and as an advanced advocate of the high prerogatives
of women. The Wooster Daily Republican , the Wayne County Democrat ,
the Wayne County Herald , the Century Club, the Women’s Foreign Mission-
ary Society : her personal friends among the professors of Wooster Univer-
sity and the State Agricultural Station; teachers in the public schools,
physicians and citizens of Wooster, and many ladies of Wooster, and her
friends in other places, gave her many commendatory eulogies.
The funeral services took place at two o’clock of Tuesday, October 8th,
at the family residence on North Market street, Wooster. The courts
adjourned in honor of her memory, and the judges and members of the
bar and the officers of the county and of the city attended the funeral in a
body. The tribute of flowers, by the Century Club, was large and beautiful,
in memory of her who was so pleasant a friend, and whose sad and untimely
death brought profound sorrow to the hearts of numerous friends in the
city of Wooster and elsewhere. She died as a martyr. Possessed of remark-
able courage, seeing the home on fire, and attempting to extinguish it, she
received her fatal injuries.
Mrs. Critchfield was a daughter of Dr. Moses Shaffer, and his wife,
Margaret McClure, daughter of Matthew McClure, Sr. She was bom in
Wooster, May 12, 1834, making her age, at her death, sixty-one years, four
months and twenty-four days. On October 2, 1854, she married Hon. L. R.
Critchfield, by which union were the following sons and daughters: Edith,
Grace, Mary, Blanche, Henry, Nellie and Lyman R., Jr.
The character of the deceased was, in many respects, a public one.
She was born and reared in the city of Wooster and was intimately associated
with the old families whose descendants constituted the society of the city.
Her vivacity, her beauty and genial disposition, and the high standing of
her family, made for her a ready welcome. Her grandfather, Jacob Shaffer,
was a soldier of the war of 1812; her uncle, Hiram Shaffer, was an elocpient
Methodist preacher; her father. Dr. Moses Shaffer, practiced medicine in
Wooster for fifty years; he was a remarkable man for energy and courage,
and this oldest daughter, Adelaide, became his companion in his professional
visits, and her acquainatnce became general in every section of the county :
her brother, Dr. Hiram M. Shaffer, was celebrated for his genius and skill
as a physician and surgeon; her brothers, Hiram, James and Horace, were
soldiers in the Civil war; her mother, Margaret McClure, was one of a
large and noble family of the early settlers; her grandparents, the McClures,
were a saintly couple of high and spotless character. The deceased had all
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the splendid virtues and splendid courage of her family so widely known,
and she enjoyed in an eminent degree the popularity of the family descent and
standing. She knew many of the distinguished men in public life, and was
familiar with public thought and public matters. She was a practical woman
of great attractions in manners and geniality: well educated and thoughtful,
she had a fine faculty of sociability in a public way; she was winning with
her smiles and genuine womanly greetings; she loved and attended public
meetings, religious, literary, musical, dramatic and political. With a num-
ber of the leading ladies of Wooster, she attended a school of parliamentary
teaching and became a parliamentarian. She was not a woman of no politics,
but had views on the rights of women, and of the people; she had inherited
anti-slaverj'' principles; she was wholly on the side of temperance and temper-
ance organizations ; she had more than ordinary public spirit. In the Univer-
sity of Wooster, in the State Agricultural Experiment Station, in the Balti-
more & Ohio railroad, in the acquisition of manufactures, in the beautify-
ing of the city, she manifested the greatest pleasure.
In her life with her neighbors, she was winning in her address, and in
her last repose there lingered upon her countenance the expression of the
lovely nature that was at peace with all the world.
In person she was esteemed as the most beautiful of women. Being
five feet seven inches in height, and her development large and symmetrical,
of beautiful face, dark, hazel eyes and dark hair: swift and agile in motion,
tasteful in dress, she reminded one of the Miltonian Eve,
“Grace was in all her steps.
Heaven in her eyes.
In every gesture, dignity
And love.”
She was the offspring of magnificent parentage. The fine muscular
perfection of her father, the healthy grace and elegant form of her mother,
and the cultivated moral sensibilities of both, invested this first child of their
love with the warmth and brilliancy of a beauty, and a purity of heart, that
gave her a rivalry of charms over her generation: she was radiant without
exertion, and the electric bloom of her exuberant health was in beaming and
beautiful repose. There was royalty in the pulsations of her blood, and in
the radiations of her graces, in the nobility of her delicaev and perfections of
form, and in the persistent magnanimity of her nature. She was loftier and
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more queenly endowed than common life, .classed with the now hundreds
of American women who are subverting the depreciated lines of the aristoc-
racy, and that transcend the Greek female of the magnificent reign of Pericles,
or the dignity and beauty of the Roman matron whose splendor was deemed
necessary to be suppressed by a decree of the Roman Senate.
How beautiful she was!
Look at her picture and see that admirable expression, that symmetry of
head and neck and shoulders. She speaks her words of love with carmine
lips; the bust significant of a form of beauty, graceful, open faced, beaming
and reflective. They bespeak for her the admiration spontaneously given to
superior personality ; the splendid evidences of the American woman.
Mrs. Critchfield’s home was one of plenty and fashion. Her father
was gentlemanly, refined, eminent as a physician, easy in his finances, and
noted for his fine carriages and blooded horses; her mother was distinguished
for her beauty, and both were in the social current of Wooster, then the
most fashionable of towns, and noted for its expensively equipped and fash-
ionable ladies and gentlemen. Of all was Adelaide the most admired, and
the most loved for her gracious and gentle disposition and manners.
For all the members of her family circle she was endowed with personal
regard. Love of her native place of Wooster and the nearby country life
of her friends was characteristic, and she often expatiated on the beauties of
nature, and revisited the scenes of her childhood, and often related her
pedestrian and equestrian exploits that developed her wealth of muscle and
limb. She was a lover of ancient trees and country landscapes. Her public
spirit, the consciousness of her own graces; her spirit of family love, and
love of all sublime things of nature, mingled in poetic enthusiasm in her
domestic labors and pleasures.
In the conditions of life she was a creative artist. To have singing birds
and flowers and gold fish, to hear the twitter of a canary, and feel the flutter
of the flowers as she lifted their heads with dewy fingers; to see her gold
fish rush, with burnished scales, to meet her approach, were her daily
enjoyment.
The family life was constantly adorned with the versatility of her
domestic genius, and sanctified bv her elegant goodness and kindness that
in a long life was never known to degenerate into anger. Taste in dress
and beauty of conduct reigned supreme in her household. LTpon the harp of
domestic life, she played soft melodies by her magnetic presence. With her
children she was like the deer with her young in the covert. The noises of
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fhe night met her springing with athletic solicitude to their rescue. Her
social graces were an inspiration. She was hospitable and gracious, disarm-
ing all doubt of welcome, and winning the love of every creature. Her
benevolence not only was extended to prominent visitors, which was very
frequent, but to every ragged and hungry wanderer that reached her door.
There wras genius in her management of home; in the art of preparing food
she was a master; in the science of housekeeping she was a magician; ever
hanging beautiful wreaths upon dingy places.
She was divine in her home. Her patience, her industry, her faithful-
ness, her wrise teaching and influence, were the incarnated spirit of domestic
life. The inspiration of heaven was upon her to make a happy home, a place
that her family would love, and her love gave her the sublimest energy.
Her children and family rise up and call her blessed. Her daughters loved
her, and reposed their heads upon her bosom, encircled her with their amis,
wooed her by endearing terms, and kissed away the lines of care; and her
sons, with no less enthusiasm of love, attended her and worshipped her as a
goddess.
Some special virtues of her life assumed peculiar prominence. A more
than ordinary education illumined the life and family of this exceptional
wroman ; she w as a counselor, comforter and inspirer. Her earlier years
were taught in the Wooster schools of Mrs. Pope and Miss Kate Rex (Mrs.
McSvveeney). She attended the female college at Granville, Ohio, and the
female college at Delaware, Ohio. Accompanying the Wooster schools were
institutions that taught and developed the graces of motion and manners
which she. with other young ladies of Wooster, attended. During all her
life her step was light and her motions graceful and polished. In her domestic
life this grace and polish adorned her. Her soft footstep going and coming
in daily duties, the rustle of her dress, the gentle voice of household govern-
ment, her noiseless coming through the rooms, her swift touch, and grace-
ful poise, and agile motion, and elastic manners, were the perfection of
versatility, and in the days of trailing skirts, when in full dress, gave her
a queenly stateliness equaled by few ; and this fine taste and educated grace-
fulness distinguished her family ; and her personal labors in clothing her
children had the touch of rare and finished skillfulness.
There was a dramatic beauty in her love of children; she crooned
sweet cadences over their cradles, and showered soft whistling bird-toned
endearment, and the echoes of angelic sighs, and sweet-lipped wreaths of
smiles, upon their tender lives; the benevolence of her life wTas a fixed habit
and always marked the family epochs with generous presents.
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Her peculiar habit of associating with the aged adorned her with a mild
and gentle temperament; the old mothers of Millersburg and Wooster loved
her. Her tender vigils at the bed of the sick; her beautiful composure and
skill; the enthralling advances of her greeting; the electricity of her touch,
seem now a lovely presence.
She was an heroic woman, without fear and without reproach; she had
the inflexible persistence of hereditary blood ; she breasted the wintry roads,
and rode down the storm, and lifted her family on, with the irresistibility
of her royal nature; her brown eyes opened with inflexible pleasantness at
precautionary suggestions; she lived in the profundity of nerve repose; she
was not marred by disease, and rejoiced through all her years in the healthy
functions of constitutional perfection ; she met each day with noble and fear-
less purpose, and in the threatening moments made her way directly to the
point of danger; she had no drop of coward's blood, and to the demands
for courage was a Joan of Arc ; and to the demands of suffering, a Florence
Nightingale.
She was a Christian. The family books marked by her in her moments
of leisure were not the classical curiosities of mythology, but the story of
a real Redeemer, and in this great trust she taught her household. She was
a habitual reader of the Divine Word. From early life she attended the
services of the church ; she was a lover of music and sang with great sweet-
ness, and as her children grew, they were trained by her in the same religious
impressions. Her religion was more than sectarian life ; her education fitted
her for larger associations; of the beauties of her life, none were more
lovely than the generosity of her religious sentiments; she freely mingled
with Christians of all denominations; she exemplified the character of her
Savior in all the duties of life. In the album of her daughter Addie she
wrote the story of her life:
“May 12, 1884.
“Dear Addie :
“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving
favor rather than silver and gold.
“Your affectionate
“Mother."
Thus on her fiftieth birthday she found no philosophy so great as
this jewel of the Divine Word.
f35»>)
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The daily life of this mother and her children, in their maturing years,
was a benediction. As soon the angry flash of ill-nature would be met in
the soft petals of the rose, or in the blossom wafted upon a zephyr, as from
the dimples that nestled in the mother’s smiles, or from the eyes that wooed
with her beckonings of melting azure. It was the management of angelic
genius! In her daily motive there was progress. One by one she turned
her children’s footsteps along the grooves of knowledge; she led them by
the- hand, encouraged and instructed them in useful ways, and watched their
slow ascent along the slopes of thought : she taught them the divine mystery
of the stars. Her love, like the electric flash over many zones, illumined her
children’s homes; as the eagle uplifts its young ones upon level plumes, and
assays to wing them in her own ethereal heights, this noble mother, in her
holy vigilance, guarded the tearful departure of her sons and daughters.
Along these fleeting years she lived a happy life: her home was charm-
ingly decorated in artistic taste; cool and clean as a temple, renovated with
hygienic care; picturesque, musical with laughter and song; sanctified by the
recognition of omnipresence.
The family nurture was an important part of her philosophy, in the
practical performance of which her whole life was distinguished, and the
phenomenal family health attested the wisdom of her early training as a
physician’s daughter. And all these beautiful habits of life were but the
concomitants of elegant physical and mental power. Her hand was steady;
her writing small, exact and uniform, the characteristics of the refinement
and polish of controlling nerve, and the beauty of her correspondence is but
another phase of that same exceptional skill manifested in family nurture,
in the preservation of leaves and blossoms in her books, and in her delight in
the beauty of her family; just as her heroic impulses caused death. And
in all her noble qualities she seems now to stand like a statue — something like
Phidias made of Minerva, plated with gold, seventy feet high, before which
the Athenians bowed as they approached the colonnades of the Parthenon.
This noble woman lived like a heroine and died like a martyr. Twenty-
four grandchildren and one great-grandchild and the future innumerable
descendants, will revere her memory.
When we last saw this noble woman, her beautiful soul had left the
sunshine of its ascension upon every lineament, and the benevolence of her
life sat upon her lips.
Note — In this attempted eulogy of one noble woman, the hundreds of
noble women of Wavne countv are intended to see their own.
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FRANK TAGGART.
In touching upon the life history of Frank Taggart, one of the best-
known members of the bar in northern Ohio, the biographer aims to avoid
fulsome encomium and extravagant praise, yet he desires to hold up for
consideration those facts which have shown the distinction of a true, useful
and honorable life — a life characterized by perseverance, energy, broad charity
and well-defined purpose. To do this will be but to reiterate the dictum pro-
nounced upon him by the people who have knowrn him so long and well.
And it is safe to say that no man in Wayne county occupies a more enviable
position in her civic and professional life, not alone on account of the suc-
cess he has achieved, but also on account of the honorable, straightforward
business policy he has ever followed, both in public and private life.
Judge Frank Taggart was bom in Smithville, Wayne county. June 6,
1852, and is the son of Dr. W. W. Taggart, now7 deceased. The elder Tag-
gart married Margaret McCaughey. He came to Wayne county, Ohio, in
1840, from Belmont county, this state, locating near the village of Smithville,
and at once entered upon the practice of his profession, in which he w7as
very successful. He was a man of strong, logical mind, a scholar and espe-
cially well grounded in historical and scientific subjects, a profound and
methodical thinker and a mathematician of much more than ordinary attain-
ments. During the past decade he abandoned the active duties of his profes-
sion, which he long honored during a very energetic and useful life, having,
while advancing his own interests and that of his family, at the same time
contributed in no paltry degree to the general advancement of his community,
being liberal, generous, public-spirited and scrupulously honest.
When his son, Frank Taggart, wras five years of age he moved to a farm
he had purchased about one and one-half miles northeast of Wooster, and
there young Taggart remained until 1868, assisting writh the work of devel-
oping the home place, learning many valuable lessons that only he who “com-
munes with nature” and breathes the pure air of the “sylvan wdld” can imbibe,
at the same time laying up a potential energy that has stood him well in
hand during his trying career as a lawyer. His father was an advocate of
thorough mental training and sought to encourage his son in whatever way
possible, consequently the lad was first placed in the district schools, later
the high school at Wooster, where he completed his preparatory work for
entrance in the University of Wooster, wrhich was soon to open its doors to
the educational public, the date of its opening being September 8, 1870, and on
that date Mr. Taggart had the distinction of being one of the first prospective
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students, registering as a freshman, remaining one of the original class of
five that passed the prescribed course in the curriculum, receiving his degree
in 1874. He made an excellent record in this institution and gave promise
of a useful and successful career. His brother. Rush Taggart, a prominent
lawyer of New York City, and a member of the firm of John B. Dillon, is
general counsel of the Western Union Telegraph Company, and graduated in
the class of 1871. the close of the first university year, and made the first
graduating speech of the class.
After finishing his schooling, Frank Taggart began the study of the law,
entering the office of Judge Joseph H. Downing, now deceased, and after a
period of study there entered the law department of the university at Ann
Arbor. Michigan, in 1875, remaining for two years, and on July 4, 1876,
he was admitted to practice in the district court of Wayne county. Judge
Reed, of Millersburg, sitting on the bench of common pleas. He at once
opened an office in Wooster without an associate in practice, which has
rapidly grown from that day to this until he now holds front rank at the
Wayne county bar. He is a loyal Republican, but never stoops to the tricks of
the demagogue. In the year 1896 he was appointed to the responsible position
of judge of the common pleas court by Gov. Asa S. Bushnell, and in the year
1905 was elected circuit judge of the fifth circuit of Ohio and in 1910 elected
chief justice of the circuit courts of Ohio.
In the year 1888 Judge Taggart was married to Lizzie Wallace, daugh-
ter of David A. Wallace, D. D., LL. D. Their family consists of seven
children, Margaret, William, Wallace, Martha F., Frank, Clementen, John F.
and David.
JOHN A. MYERS.
The able and popular assistant cashier of the Wayne County National
Bank at Wooster, Ohio, is most consistently accorded recognition in a work
of the province assigned to the one at hand, since it has to do with tWe
representative citizens of Wayne county, of wrhich number he is unquestion-
ably a worthy member and has played well his part in fostering the diver-
sified interests of the same, and while yet a young man has show n what fidelity
to duty, coupled with right principles, can accomplish. He is a native of this
county, having been born near New' Pittsburg, Chester township, on August
14, 1871, the son of David Myers, of Wooster, a sketch of whom appears
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elsewhere in this volume. He is a worthy son of a worthy sire, — in fact, takes
a delight in keeping untarnished the brilliant escutcheon of the Myers name,
which has long been highly honored in this locality. He received a good
practical education in the district schools of his township, later attending
the high school at Wooster. When eighteen years of age he removed to
W ooster with his parents, and attended Wooster University for a period
of two years, during which time he made a very commendable record for
both scholarship and deportment. Desiring to fit himself for a business
career, he took a course in Eastman’s Business College at Poughkeepsie, New
York, graduating from the same with a very creditable record.
After he had finished his education, young Myers acted as deputy clerk
of the courts at Wooster for six years, doing very creditable work, — in fact,
he had mastered the details of the office so well that he attracted the notice
of the officials of the Ashland & Wooster Railroad Company, who invited
him to serve as their chief clerk with headquarters at Ashland, which posi-
tion he held for a period of four years, giving his usual success. He re-
turned to Wooster in 1903 and became assistant cashier of the Wayne County
National Bank, which position he still holds, discharging the duties of the
same in a manner that shows him to be a man of rare business qualities, alert,
painstaking and eminently capable.
Mr. Myers was married on May 28, 1902, to Lydia C. George, a lady
of culture and refinement, the daughter of D. C. and Harriet F. George, of
Latrobe. Pennsylvania, where Mrs. Myers was born and reared and where
her family were long prominent. The home of Mr. and Mrs. Myers has been
blessed by the birth of two children, namely : Laura Minerva, born Septem-
ber 13, 1903, and Claudia Virginia, born May 5, 1907.
Mr. Myers is now a member of the city school board, being the youngest
member ever honored thus. He takes an abiding interest in local educational
affairs, and the cause of education here has been augmented since he became
a member of the same. Fraternally, Mr. Mvers belongs to the Independent
Order of Odd Fellows and the Knights of Pythias. In politics he is a loyal
Democrat, and he and his wife are members of the First Presbyterian church,
being liberal supporters of the same.
The Myers residence on Beall avenue is modern, beautifully located and
nicely furnished, and is often the gathering place for many of the best people
of Wooster where hospitality and friendship ever prevail. Mr. Myers is a
man of pleasing address, frank, generous, courteous and straightforward.
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JUDGE ROBERT L. ADAIR.
A name too well known to the readers of this history to need any formal
introduction here is that of Judge Robert L. Adair, who for many years
has been a conspicuous figure in the local courts and has won distinctive
prestige in a community widely noted for the high order of its legal talent.
He was born in Wooster township, Wayne county, Ohio, February 2, 1869,
the son of Anderson and Emeline (Yocum) Adair. The Judge’s grandfather
settled in this county in 1825 among the pioneers. His father, who took con-
siderable interest in political matters, served as county commissioner from
1867 to 1872. Emeline Yocum was a teacher in the public schools of Woos-
ter for a number of years, a daughter of Rev. Elmer Yocum, a pioneer Meth-
odist minister who located in Congress township in 1826, and who. for a
period of three score and ten years, actively engaged in the spreading of the
gospel in Ohio and Wisconsin, dying in the latter state in 1898 at the ad-
vanced age of ninety-two years. Rev. Elmer Yocum, the paternal grandfather
of the subject, was born in Congress township, Wayne county, Ohio, in
1807. He preached in Ohio until 1840 when he moved to Wisconsin and
there preached fifty-seven years. He was a delegate to the general confer-
ence on four different occasions.
Robert L. Adair spent his boyhood days attending the common schools
and assisting with the work about the home place. Being ambitious to make
a name in the legal profession, he entered the University of Wooster, from
which he was graduated with a very creditable record in 1891. He studied
law with his brother, John S. Adair, and was admitted to the bar in June,
1893, and soon thereafter began the practice of his profession in Orrville,
where he remained until 1895, having gained a promising start in his career
as a lawyer which augured still greater things for the future. An oppor-
tunity presenting itself at Wooster, he returned to this city and formed a
partnership with his brother, with whom he had studied, and he has since re-
mained in the practice here, having built up quite a satisfactory clientele.
Since July 1, 1908, he has been in partnership with W. F. Kean.
September 10, 1908, the Judge was married to Mary S. Campbell, of
Indianapolis, daughter of E. A. Campbell, a prominent family of the cap-
ital city.
A man with such popularity among his fellow citizens and with such
pronounced ability could not long fail to attract the attention of political
leaders, and he was selected as the candidate for probate judge bv the Demo-
crats in 1899, and in the following autumn he was triumphantly elected to
that office, faithfully and ably discharging the duties of the same for a period
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of six years, his record having been most satisfactory to all concerned, irre-
spective of party affiliations. Prior to his election as probate judge he served
one term in 1897 as city solicitor of Wooster, declining renomination.
Judge Adair, by his persistent application, his genuine worth and the
force of his native powers, has elevated himself to a prominent position at
the Ohio bar, possessing a broad and comprehensive knowledge of jurispru-
dence. He is a strong, energetic, practical business lawyer. His zeal and
fixedness of purpose and policy in the defense of his client evokes the careful
and considerate attention of a jury, and when on the bench his decisions were
fair, learned and impartial. His is a genial, cordial nature, with proper poise
and dignity. In his private ways we see the ebb and flow of his social nature,
interesting alike in both. Faithful as he has been, and is, to official and pro-
fessional trusts, an advocate and champion of popular education, and in
sympathy with the spirit of our free institutions/he is one of the representa-
tive citizens of Wayne county and the great commonwealth of Ohio.
John S. Adair, brother of Judge Adair, went to New Mexico in 1897 and
located at Clovis, where he is now practicing law. He married Caroline
Goldsmith, of Painsville, Ohio, and to this union five children have been born :
Mary Anderson, Ruth Smiley, Blanche M., John Patrick and Eddie.
Prof. Edward E. Adair, brother of the Judge, is superintendent of
schools at Doylestown, this county. He married Nina Franks in December,
1891, and three children have been born to them: Lyman, Frances and
Jeanette.
Jennie Adair, sister of the subject, graduated from the University of
Wooster in 1899. She took a post-graduate course here in 1901, since
which time she has been teaching in various high schools and is now principal
of schools at Clovis, New Mexico.
Mrs. Robert L. Adair’s father is a retired Methodist minister, living at
Indianapolis. For many years he was presiding elder in the Indiana confer-
ence. Mrs. Adair is a graduate of Moore’s Hill College, and she took a post-
graduate course at Depainv University, after which she taught in various high
schools until her marriage. Both she and Judge Adair are members of the
Methodist Episcopal church, regular attendants and liberal supporters of
the same.
SMITH ORR, M. D.
The subject of this sketch, who for many years was one of the representa-
tive medical practitioners of Grant county, Oregon, is the only living repre-
sentative of the Orr family for whom the town of Orrville was named, and
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is the only surviving child of the late Hon. William M. Orr. Doctor Orr
was born in the eastern part of Wayne county, Ohio, on the 23d of November,
1849. He is the oldest of four children born to his parents, the others being:
John, who was born July 20, 1851, and is now deceased; William S., who
was born February 4, 1856, and is deceased; and Mrs. S. M. Brenneman,
born January 8, 1858, and died January 5, 1909, leaving a husband and
two daughters.
Dr. Smith Orr was reared in Wooster until he was fourteen years old,
when he removed with his father to Orrville. He received his education in
the public schools of Wooster and Orrville, supplementing this by attendance
at the Western Reserve College, at Hudson, Ohio. Having then determined
to make the practice of medicine his life work, the subject entered Rush
Medical College, at Chicago, where he graduated in 1876, receiving the degree
of Doctor of Medicine. He at once entered upon the active practice of his
profession, locating first at Hardin, Lasalle county, Illinois, but subsequently
removing to Canyon City, Oregon. He was a successful practitioner, com-
manding a large and remunerative patronage, and stood high among the men
of his calling. In 1892, on account of the death of his father, Doctor On-
returned to Orrville and has since devoted his time to looking after his
extended landed interests. The Doctor was, while engaged in the practice,
considered an unusually good diagnostician and kept in close touch with every
advance made in the healing art. He took a post-graduate course at the New
York Polyclinic and commanded the confidence of those whom he treated.
Doctor Orr has never married, and is living quietly and unostentatiously
at Orrville. He possesses a good library and is a close reader and keen ob-
server of men and events, keeping himself well informed on the current events
of the day.
The subject's paternal grandfather. Smith Orr, for whom he was named,
owned one of the first houses in Orrville. This house is still standing, having
sheltered three generations of the family. Judge Smith Orr died on April
1, 1865.
JUDGE MARTIN L. SMYSER.
An enumeration of the representative citizens of Wavne county of the
past generation who won recognition and success for themselves and at the
same time conferred honor upon the community, would be decidedly incom-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
56o*5
revered gentleman whose name introduces this biographical compendium, the
late Judge Martin L. Smyser, whose name was long a household word in
northern Ohio, where he held worthy prestige in legal and political circles.
He was always distinctively a man of affairs, wielding a wide influence among
those with whom his lot was cast, ever having the affairs of his county at
heart and doing what he could to aid in its development, for he believed
that his native county of Wayne was one of the most attractive, progressive
and prosperous of any in the Union and did not care to live outside her
borders, and it has always been due to such men as Judge Smyser that she
could justly claim a high order of citizenship and a spirit of enterprise which
conserved consecutive development and marked advancement in its material
upbuilding. The county has been, and is, signally favored in the class
of men who have controlled its affairs in official capacity, and this is one
of the connections in which Judge Smyser demands recognition, serving the
locality faithfully and well in positions of distinct trust and responsibility.
He achieved a brilliant record at the bar at an age when most men are
merely starting on their life work, for from the beginning he was intensely
methodical and unswervingly scientific in search and seizure of the true
light and of the essential morality and inspiration of the legal foundations,
and in sources of legal conception and thought, conscientious and intensely
pure, having an exalted firmness with which he recognized the morality of
the fixed principles of judicial systems, holding devoutly to the highly embel-
lished record of equity, the invariable theorems of law, the sure, certain,
invincible methods of practice; therefore, abundant success could not help
crowning his efforts and placing him on the topmost rung of the legal and
judicial ladder and winning for him the well merited laudation of his
fellowmen.
Judge Martin L. Smyser was a scion of an ancestry of which anyone
might well be proud and many of their sterling traits outcropped in him,
giving him fortitude, directness, keenness of perception and probity of char-
acter. He was born in Chester township, Wayne county, Ohio, April 3, 1851,
the son of Mr. and Mrs. Emanuel Smyser, the father a native of York
county. Pennsylvania, where he was reared and educated in the pioneer
schools, but who followed the wake of the tide of emigration that set in
heavily for the West in 1832. He located in Wayne county, Ohio, where he
was able to foresee a vast development and great possibilities to the strong
of hekrt and arm and here he cleared a small plot of ground, erected a
primitive dwelling 3nd formed the nucleus of a comfortable and happy
home, enjoying the fruition that always rewards the honest tiller of the soil
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in a virgin country. The Smysers have thus figured quite prominently in
both York county, Pennsylvania, and in Wayne county, Ohio, since the
epoch which historians are pleased to designate as early times. One of the
well remembered relatives of the Judge was Jacob Smyser, a native of York
county, Pennsylvania, where he was born on June 27, 1810, there grew
up and married Sarah Diehl, and came to Wayne county, Ohio, with the
Judge’s father in 1832, and here reared a family of seven children, and
lived here on a farm for a half century or more, taking an active interest in
whatever tended to develop the county. His father, also named Jacob
Smyser, and also a native of York county, Pennsylvania, died in 1840. He
was a farmer and of German ancestry, as the name implies. The elder
Smysers were Lutherans and known as men of sterling principles, honest,
unswerving in their rectitude of purpose and action, consequently the probity
of character of Judge Martin L. Smyser may be accounted for.
Judge Smyser grew to maturity on his father’s farm, where he assisted
in the work of developing the same and thereby imbibed a deep love of
nature, laying the foundation for a rugged manhood and learning many
lessons of subsequent value in shaping his destinies. Life on the farm acted
on him as on many of our great men who have come up from the maul and
the axe, the plow and the reaper, — cultivating a reflective and perceptive
faculty, the ability to see clearly and to weigh accurately all problems and
things affecting daily life.
Judge Smyser received his primary education in the common schools;
always a student and ambitious to succeed, he applied himself very assid-
uously to his studies and made rapid progress. Early deciding to enter the
legal profession, he began bending every effort in that direction. At an early
age he entered Wittenburg College, Springfield, Ohio, where he made a bril-
liant record for scholarship and from which institution he was graduated in
1870. Soon afterward he began the study of law in earnest in the office of
Hon. L. R. Critchfield, one of the most distinguished practitioners of the local
bar, and under his able guidance Judge Smyser made rapid strides. He
passed the required legal examination at Columbus. Ohio, in April, 1872,
and at once opened an office in Wooster and was successful from the first,
soon climbing to a front rank among his colleagues at the Wayne county
bar. Such a favorable impression did he make upon his fellow citizens that
in the fall of 1872, when only twenty-one years of age, he was nominated
by the Republican party for prosecuting attorney of Wayne county, and he
made a most active, aggressive, vigorous and almost astonishing record as
a campaigner for one of such tender years and achieved a triumphant elec-
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tion, and he discharged the duties of the office in a manner that soon con-
vinced the most skeptical of his unquestioned ability. In 1873 he entered
into professional relationship with Hon. A. S. McClure, which combination
was one of unusual strength and which was long continued.
Judge Smyser was chosen as an alternate delegate to the Republican
national convention in Chicago in 1884, and in 1888 he was sent as a regular
delegate, and during that year he was elected to the fifty-first Congress from
the twentieth district by a majority of two thousand, a criterion of his
general high standing in this district, and he won the undivided approval of
all his constituents while a member of that distinguished body, where he was
active in the affairs pertaining to his district and where his counsel was often
sought and heeded by his colleagues. On January 15, 1898, he was appointed
to the. bench of the circuit court by Gov. Asa S. Bushnell to fill the vacancy
occasioned by the death of Judge Julius C. Pomerene, and he soon proved
his preparedness and fitness in every respect for this high position, having
by nature and training a judicial mind that was clear in analysis and fair
in all decisions, and he, in this connection, widely extended his circle of
personal, legal and political friends, and perhaps no lawyer in the judicial
district over which he presided ever enjoyed a more profound popularity
than he, which came as a result of his ability and his noble personality.
This splendid type of high citizenship, able lawyer, capable jurist,
popular exponent of the people whose rights he sought to champion at all
times, whether in private, public or legislative capacities, was called to a
higher plane of action by the fate that awaits all mankind, his death being
counted a distinct and irreparable loss to the section of the state in which
he lived.
In 1881 Judge Smyser was united in marriage to Alice A. France, a
native of Wayne county, of which her father had formerly been sheriff.
She is a graduate of the Delaware Female College.
Judge Smyser was honored and esteemed by all who knew him for his
life of honor, usefulness, unselfishness, genuine worth, integrity and public
spirit; for his high purpose and unconquerable will, vigorous mental powers,
diligent study and devotion to duty — these being some of the means by
which he made himself eminently useful. The good he has accomplished
for his county and state cannot be adequately expressed, and for generations
to come the* commendable things he did will continue to influence and direct
human thought and action in this section of the great Buckeye common-
wealth.
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ADAIR FAMILY.
The family name which heads this article has long been identified with
the history and progress of Wayne county and is one which has been dis-
tinguished and renowned far beyond common. Of Irish ancestry for many
generations, the first of the family under immediate consideration was Patrick
Adair, born in 1797 in county Down, Ireland, where in his early manhood
he became identified with the home rule insurrection headed by the lamented
Emmet, and he found it necessary to leave the land of his fathers; accordingly
he came to America and settled in western Pennsylvania, where he soon after-
ward married Mary Stuart. Of the five children born to them, only one
lived to maturity, she being Mrs. Mary Wilson, of Burlington, Iowa, now
deceased. His wife died in about 1815 and several years later he married
Ann Anderson, and to them were born five children, Jane E., Eliza, James M.,
Thomas A. and Anderson.
In 1825 Mr. Adair removed to Wayne county, Ohio, and settled on a
farm not far distant from Wooster. Here his second wife died, at the age
of thirty -nine years, and Mr. Adair again married, his wife being Ann Mc-
Cracken, who died in 1843, leaving no children. Mr. Adair in early life had
not been the recipient of educational advantages, but possessed a keen and
retentive memory and was considered a man of a high order of intelligence.
He was industrious and provident and possessed those qualities of mind and
heart which make men honored and beloved rather than conduce to prosper-
ity in worldly affairs. He was a stanch Democrat of the Thomas Jefferson
type, whose principles he strongly advocated. He served in the war of 1812,
in the capacity of surgeon’s mate, or assistant. In religious belief he was a
life-long Presbyterian. He died in 1866, at the advanced age of eighty-
nine years.
Anderson Adair, son of Patrick and Ann (Anderson) Adair, was born
in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, and soon thereafter the family re-
moved to Ohio. As a boy he attended the district schools and as a young man
he performed the ordinary duties of a farmer’s life until he reached the age
of twenty-five, when for one year he attended the academy at Wooster, and
for several years following he was engaged in the work of teaching. At the
age of twenty-seven years he married Henrietta McClure and to them were
born five children, of whom two are living. Prof. Edward E., of Doylestown,
Ohio, and John S., concerning whom more follows. Mrs. Adair died in
1861, and some time later Mr. Adair married Emeline, daughter of Rev.
Elmer \ocum. a minister of the Methodist Episcopal church. She was a
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lady of accomplishments and intellectual attainment, a graduate of Baldwin
University and later a teacher of much ability. To this union there came two
children, Judge Robert L. and Jennie L.
Mr. Adair was widely and most favorably known throughout Wayne
county and was honored by political preferment upon many occasions, faith-
fully performing the duties and holding sacred the trust reposed in him. For
some years he was one of the county commissioners of Wayne county, and
in this capacity he had much to do with the management and conduct of im-
portant business in connection with improvements, etc., undertaken in behalf
of the populace. He was deeply interested in matters of education and was
one of the organizers of the board of education of Wooster township, and
was for nearly or quite thirty years a member of it. For nearly seventy
years he lived on the farm his father settled, where he created many improve-
ments and where by hard labor and intelligent effort he acquired a compe-
tency. He was ever active in all movements that had for their end the
advancement and good of the community, state and nation. In politics he
was like his father, a Democrat. He died in July, 1905.
John S. Adair, son of Anderson and Henrietta (McClure) Adair, was
born May 26, 1859. Until he was fifteen years of age he attended school and
lived the life of a youth upon the farm. At this age he became a student
of Wooster University, where for six years he pursued the college course.
During this period he continued with his father, devoting such time as could
be spared from his studies to assisting with the farm work. In 1881 he
entered the law firm of Wiley & McClaran, alternating his legal researches
with teaching a series of schools in Clinton, Wayne, Plain and Wooster town-
ships. In the spring of 1886 he went to Coronado, Kansas, engaging in land
business and practice of law. In 1888 he returned to Wooster, and was ad-
mitted to practice in Ohio courts, opening an office in Wooster, where he for a
number of years conducted an extended and lucrative practice. In 1889 he
was elected city solicitor of Wooster.
WILLIAM JAMES SEELYE.
It is generally considered by those in the habit of superficial thinking
that the history of so-called great men only is worthy of preservation and that
little merit exists among the masses to call forth the praises of the historian
or the cheers and the appreciation of mankind. A greater mistake was never
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made. No man is great in all things. Many by a lucky stroke achieve last-
ing fame who before that had no reputation beyond their own neighborhoods.
It is not a history of the lucky stroke which benefits humanity most, but the
long study and effort which made the lucky stroke possible. It is the prelim-
inary work, the method, that serves as a guide for the success of others.
Among those in Wayne county who have achieved success along steady lines
of action is William James Seelye, one of Wooster’s popular and progressive
citizens, who, like many of the leading people here, is a product of the great
Empire state, he having been born in Schenectady, New York, April 10, 1857.
He is the scion of an excellent ancestry, highly honored and distinguished
in various walks of life. His mother, Elizabeth Tilman James, was a native
of Albany, cousin of the famous Prof. William James, of Harvard Univer-
sity, and his father, Julius Hawley Seelye, was for many years pastor of the
Dutch Reformed church of Schenectady. He was a man of unusual intelli-
gence, being profoundly educated, and he was a leader in his community. In
1858 he was appointed professor of mental and moral science in Amherst
College, at Amherst, Massachusetts, which position he held with much credit
to himself and to the entire satisfaction of all concerned until 1876, when,
owing to his eminent record there, he was made president of the institution
and became one of the most popular and influential educators in the state.
William J. Seelye, of this review, spent his boyhood at home and grew
to maturity in the midst of the most wholesome environment, one that made
for culture, education and refinement. After a preparatory education, he en-
tered Amherst College, from which he was graduated in 1879. After a year
of post-graduate work at home and a year of study in Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, he spent two years abroad, seven months in Edinburgh University and
a semester each in Halle and Leipzig. Thus well equipped for his life work,
having decided to follow in the footsteps of his worthy father, he began his
career as teacher, having returned home in 1883, in which year he was ap-
pointed professor of Greek and German in Iowa College at Grinnell, Iowa.
The year 1885 to 1886 he taught, as classical undermaster, in Lawrenceville
Academy, New Jersey. I11 all these institutions he readily proved his fitness
for the position held.
Professor Seelye was married in September, 1886, to Alice Clarke, a
ladv of culture and talent, the daughter of a well-established and prominent
family at Iowa City, Iowa. He spent the year 1886 to 1887 with her as a
member of the American Archaeological Institute at Athens. Greece. The fol-
lowing two years Professor Seelye taught in connection with Amherst Col-
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lege and in 1889 he became professor of Greek in Parsons College, Fairfield,
Iowa, where he remained two years. Since 1891 he has been professor of
Greek in the University of Wooster.
The pleasant home of Professor and Mrs. Seelve has been blessed by the
birth of three interesting children, named as follows: Laurens, born in 1889;
Katharine, born in 1891, and Julius, born in 1899.
As a teacher. Professor Seelye has met with merited success and in his
capacity of instructor of Greek especially his record presents a series of suc-
cesses such as few attain. He pursues his chosen calling with all the interest
of an enthusiast, is thoroughly in harmony with the spirit of the work and
has a proper conception of the dignity of the profession to which his life and
energies are so unselfishly devoted. A finished scholar, a polished gentleman
and possessing the traits of character necessary to insure success, the services
thus far rendered and the laurels gained bespeak for him a wider and more
distinguished career of usefulness in years to come. Unlike so many of his
calling who become narrow and pedantic, he is easily a man of the times,
broad and liberal in his views and has the courage of his convictions on all the
leading public questions and issues upon which men and parties divide. He
also keeps in trend with modern thought along its various lines and is a man
of scholarly and refined taste, while his familiarity with the more practical
affairs of the day makes him feel at ease with all classes and conditions of
people whom he meets.
WILLIAM NICHOLAS RIES.
Agriculture has been the true source of man’s dominion on earth ever
since the primal existence of labor, and it has been the pivotal industry that
has controlled, for the most part, all the fields of action to which his intel-
ligence and energy have been devoted. Among this sturdy element in Chip-
pewa township, Wayne county, whose labors have profited alike themselves
and the community in which they live is the gentleman whose name appears
at the head of this biographical review, and in view of the consistent career
lived by Mr. Ries since coming to this section of the country, it is particularly
fitting that the following short record of his life and labors be incorporated
in a book of this nature. Like many of the most thrifty citizens of this
county, lie came to us from the German empire, which has furnished so many
of the progressive citizens of this country.
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William Nicholas Ries was born in Sauphereicher, Germany, March
22, 1846, the third son of Martin and Mary (Becker) Ries. William N.
was brought to America by his parents when only eighteen months old. The
family settled in Chippewa township, Wayne county, Ohio, in 1847. The
father was a coal miner and he was known as a hard working, honest man.
William N. Ries, of this review, was educated in the country schools,
and he engaged in coal mining for some time, later purchasing a small farm,
having saved his earnings. He was married on March 29, 1866, to Barbara
Frase, daughter of Squire Peter and Mary Frase, a highly respected family.
To this union have been born Mrs. Ada Shank, of Doylestown, this county;
Minnie, who lives at Johnson’s Corners; and Irvin, a well known and success-
ful farmer.
Mr. Ries was land appraiser twenty years ago, and he has held all the
offices in the Lutheran church, of which he is a very faithful member.
As a farmer he has made a very comfortable living and has a comforta-
ble home ; he keeps his place in excellent condition and is spending his de-
clining years in comfort and peace, and is well worthy of the friendship
which all his neighbors freely accord. He is a good man in all the walks
of life, and has so conducted himself as to be worthy of the esteem that has
been accorded him by those with whom he has come into contact. His chil-
dren, having been reared in a careful manner, are also highly respected by
all classes.
WILLIAM EDWIN WEYGANDT.
The gentleman whose name forms the caption of this sketch is not a man
who courts publicity, yet it must be a pleasure to him. as is natural, to know
how well he stands with his fellow citizens throughout northern Ohio, especial-
ly his native county of Wayne. The public is seldom mistaken in its estima-
tion of a man, and had Mr. Weygandt not been most worthy he could not have
gained the high position he now holds in public and social life. Having long
maintained the same without abatement of his popularity, his standing in the
county is perhaps now in excess of what it has ever been. He has by his own
persistent and praiseworthy efforts won for himself a name whose luster the
future years shall only augment. The term “self-made” may not convey much
to some, but when applied to such a man as Mr. Weygandt it has a peculiar
force, for he belongs to that interesting class of men, of unquestioned merit
and honor, whose life histories show that they have been compelled, very
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largely, to map out their own career and furnish their own motive force in
scaling the heights of success, thereby meriting the applause of their fellows.
W. E. Weygandt is a native of Baughman township, where he first saw
the light of day on June i, 1864, and he is the son of J. K. and Mary Wey-
gandt. The boyhood days of Mr. Weygandt, like those of so many of our suc-
cessful men of affairs, especially the learned professions, were spent upon the
farm, where he worked during the summer months, alternating farming with
schooling in the district schools. He was an ambitious lad and applied him-
self most assiduously to his text books. His principal dependence, as we have
before intimated, was very largely upon himself ; however, this is not a regret-
table fact, for it strengthened his fortitude, courage and self-dependence, and
without such attributes no life is a success. Desiring a higher education than
the* common schools could furnish, he entered the Normal University at Ada,
Ohio, where he made a splendid record and from which institution he was
graduated on July 23, 1895. He had decided to become a teacher and accord-
ingly entered that profession, which he followed with credit for a period of
ten years, during which time he gained an excellent local reputation as an
educator, his services having been in great demand, for he had thoroughly
equipped himself and seemed to possess all the natural qualifications for the
successful teacher. But believing that the law was his proper field of action,
he took up its study with A. D. Metz, of Wooster, who was at one time prose-
cuting attorney of Wayne county and a lawyer of great ability and fame. This
was in April, 1894, and having made rapid progress in the same, Mr. Wey-
gandt was admitted to practice at the Ohio bar the following October. He
was remarkably successful from the first and soon had a large clientele, figur- ,
ing conspicuously in many important cases in the local courts from time to
time. His ability and public spirit attracted the attention of the leaders of
the Democratic party and he was selected as the candidate of this party for
prosecuting attorney of Wayne county in 1898. He was elected and filled the
office with rare credit and acceptance, proving the wise selection of his con-
stituents. On April 29, 1908, Mr. Weygandt Was nominated for the office of
judge of the common pleas court of Wayne county and in the ensuing election
he was the choice of the voters, defeating his opponent, W. F. Kean, bv a
majority of two thousand and seven hundred. He assumed the duties of his
office on January 1, 1909, and in this responsible position he has again proved
in no uncertain manner his eminent fitness for a position demanding ability of
high order and an intimate and discriminating acquaintance with the prin-
ciples of jurisprudence. His decisions have uniformly been characterized by
(350
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a high sense of justice, guided by a wide knowledge of law and precedent, and
his administration of his official duties has been eminently satisfactory to both
litigants and attorneys.
In September, 1886, Judge Weygandt was married to Cora Mock, daugh-
ter of Samuel Mock, a well known and highly respected farmer, now retired at
the age of eighty-two years. To this union have been born three children,
Carl, now a student in Wooster University, Ross and Ola.
As a lawyer Mr. Weygandt ranks deservedly high at the Wayne county
bar. His habits of study, research, ability to analyze and comprehend the law,
to deduce and apply it, make him an informed, reliable and certain lawyer, and
necessarily successful. In his practice before the court he was characterized
by fairness in stating the position of an adversary, and strong enough and
broad enough to desire no undue advantage. His utterances are expressive
of a calm dignity, a tolerant spirit, but a fixed purpose. In his discussion of
the law he is terse, clear, precise and incisive, and to the jury he is clear, de-
liberate, impressive. In his active practice of the law his character for per-
' sonal and professional integrity was fully recognized and appreciated. He
escaped the suspicion of ever having knowingly failed to fulfill all proper obli-
gations of his profession. Combined with the excellent personal and official
qualities of the successful attorney and jurist, he is infused with the genius
of enterprise and is a man of enlarged public spirit. He always stands ready
to identify himself with his fellowr citizens in any good work and extends a
co-operative hand to advance any measure that will better the condition of
things, that will give better government, elevate mankind, insure higher stand-
ards of morality and the highest ideals of a refined, ennobling, intellectual
culture.
JAMES LEE ZARING.
Of high professional and academic attainments and ranking among the
foremost educators of northern Ohio, James Lee Zaring, now the efficient and
popular county auditor of Wayne county, has achieved marked distinction in
the noble work to which his talents and energies have so long been devoted,
and, judging by the past, it is safe to predict for him a future of still greater
usefulness and honor. Xot only as a teacher and manager of schools has he
made his presence felt, but as a citizen in the daily walks of life, his influence
has tended to the advancement of the community and the welfare of his
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fellow men, while the several responsible public positions to which he has been
called from time to time bear testimony of his ability to fill worthily high and
important trusts. His name with eminent fitness occupies a conspicuous place
in the profession which he adorns and his career, presenting a series of suc-
cesses such as few attain, has gained for him much more than local reputation
as a successful organizer and manager of educational interests.
Mr. Zaring was born at Jefferson, Plain township, Wayne county, Ohio,
December 4, 1859, the son of Eli and Mary (Stevie) Zaring, both natives of
Plain township, this county, the father having been born on January 16, 1836,
and the latter in 1832, each representing old pioneer families of sterling worth
who came here in the days of the forest primeval when the country was over-
run by wild beasts and the council fires of the red men had scarcely died away.
They were a sturdy people who delighted to meet and overcome great obsta-
cles,— in short, they were true types of empire builders, making it possible for
succeeding generations to live in ease and affluence, to ride in modern motor
cars over trails which they blazed and over which their ox carts passed. An
insight into the characteristics of the subject would indicate that he had in-
herited some of the worthy traits of his rugged progenitors.
Eli Zaring grew up on the home farm which he helped clear, and al-
though his chances to receive an education in the old ax-hewn one-roomed
school houses of that remote period were indeed limited, he made the most
of every advantage and became in after years a well informed man, who was
influential in county affairs and who very creditably filled the office of clerk of
the local courts for a period of six years. He was for many years solicitor
for the Wayne County Democrat and he held every office in Plain township,
a Republican stronghold ; this proved his high .standing in his native com-
munity, for he was always a loyal Democrat. The court appointed him ap-
praiser of land in Chester township in 1880. He was a great friend of Capt.
Lemuel Jeffries, — in fact, he was a man admired by all who knew him, for he
was honest, public-spirited and straightforward in all his dealings with his
fellow men.
James L. Zaring was educated in the district schools of Plain township,
which he attended during the winter months, working in his father’s shoe
shop the rest of the year. He also attended the Smithville Normal School,
where he made an excellent record in both scholarship and deportment. Being
ambitious to enter the career of an educator, he prepared himself very care-
fully to that end and during his long service as such he has given the utmost
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satisfaction and his services have been in great demand ; he holds a life certifi-
cate and he was county examiner for a period of nine years.
Professor Zaring was married, on June 3, 1882, to Celestia Reamer,
daughter of Jacob and Sophia Reamer, a highly honored family of Smithville.
Mrs. Zaring is a woman of culture and refinement and she has been of great
assistance to her husband in his manifold duties since their marriage, always
encouraging him and counseling him in whatever work he was engaged. This
union has been blessed by the birth of four children, two of which died in
infancy; the two living children are Ethel, now twenty-six years of age. and
John, who is twenty-four years old.
Politically, Professor Zaring is a Democrat and he has held many of
the minor village offices and is now auditor of Wayne county, filling the office
in a manner that is winning universal approval. He stands high in Masonry,
being a member of the Knights Templar, Wooster Commanderv, Xo. 48;
Cedar Lodge, No. 430, Free and Accepted Masons, of Orrville, and Wooster
Chapter, No. 27, Royal Arch Masons.
Although a school man in the broadest and best sense of the term. Pro-
fessor Zaring has never become narrow or pedantic, as have so many whose
lives have been spent in intimate association with the immature minds within
the four walls of a school room. He is a well rounded, symmetrically de-
veloped man, fully alive to the demands of the times, thoroughly informed
on the leading questions before the public and takes broad views of men and
things. Bv keeping in touch with the times and the trend of current thought
he has ever been enabled to discharge the duties of citizenship in the intelligent
manner becoming the level-headed American of today, and his acquaintance
with the history of the country and its institutions makes him also a politician,
but not necessarily a partisan. He believes in progress in other than the pro-
fession to which he belongs and to attain the end manifests an abiding interest
in whatever makes for the material advancement of the community, encourag-
ing all worthy enterprises and lending his influence to means whereby his fel-
low men may be benefited and made better. He is in hearty accord with
laudable and healthful pastimes and sports, such as base ball, basket ball,
hurdle and foot racing and all kinds of athletes that tend to develop and
strengthen the physical powers. These he has always encouraged among his
pupils, believing that development of the body as well as the mind and heart to
he essential to the make-up of the scholarly and well-rounded man. Wayne
county owes a great debt of gratitude to Professor Zaring for the great good
he has done in educational, political, social and material affairs.
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M. M. VAN NEST.
To write the personal record of men who have raised themselves to a
position of honor and responsibility in a community is no ordinary pleasure.
Self-made men, men who have achieved success by reason of their personal
qualities and who have put the impress of their individuality upon the business
and growth of their place of residence and affect for good such institutions as
are embraced within the sphere of their usefulness, unwittingly, perhaps,
build monuments more enduring than marble obelisk or granite shaft. Of
such we have the unquestioned right to say belongs the gentleman whose name
appears above. As a business man, as member of the city legislative body,
and as its chief executive official, as well as in the more humble walks of life,
he has borne well his part and his public spirited and unselfish devotion to
the highest and best interests of the community have w*on for him the high
regard of all, regardless of political lines.
M. M. Van Nest was born at Row^sburg, Ashland county, Ohio, on the
10th of December, 1864. He is descended from Holland antecedents, the
family name having originally been Van Ness. The subject’s paternal grand-
father was John Van Nest, who was born in Pennsylvania, but came to Ohio
in 1839, settling in Ashland county. He was a harness-maker by trade and
followed this occupation all his active life. He died in 1903, at the advanced
age of eighty-nine years. The subject's parents were J. P. and Mary E.
(Gardner) Van Nest. J. P. Van Nest was born at Rowsburg, Ohio, and
upon taking up a business career entered upon that of insurance in which he
was successful. In the spring of 1873 he removed to the city of Wooster,
and here continued in the insurance business until his death, which occurred
on April 3. 1905. Mr. Van Nest was a public-spirited man and took a keen
interest in public affairs, serving for two terms as a member of the Wooster
city council. Early in the great Rebellion, Mr. Van Nest enlisted for service
in the defense of his country’s flag, joining the One Hundred and Twentieth
Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and served three years, taking part in
some of the most sanguinary struggles of that great conflict. Among these
battles were the following: Chickasaw’ Bayou, December 28-29, 1862; Arkan-
sas Post, January 11. 1863: Thompson’s Hill (Port Gibson). May 1, 1863;
siege of Vicksburg, May 18 to July 4, 1863; Big Black River. May 17, 1863;
Jackson. Miss.. July 9-16, 1863; transport “City Belle,” near Snaggy Point,
Louisiana. May 3, 1864. Mr. Van Nest enlisted as a private, but, by faithful
and meritorious service, he retired from the service with the rank of second
lieutenant. At the battle of Vicksburg he was severely wounded by a frag-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
ment of shell. Prior to entering the military service Mr. Van Nest had fol-
lowed the trade of harness-maker, but on his return home he gave that up and
took up the insurance business. He married Mary E. Gardner, who was a
native of Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, as were also her parents. She is
still living in Wooster, at the age of sixty-seven years. By her union with
Mr. Van Nest she became the mother of the following children : John, of
Wooster; M. M., the subject of this sketch; Carrie, the wife of William L.
Derr, of Cleveland, Ohio; Gertrude, deceased; Maud M., the widow of John
Griffith and living in Wooster; Ellen, deceased: Charles W., of Wooster;
Mabel is unmarried and remains at home.
M. M. Van Nest was nine years old when his parents removed to Wooster
and in the public schools of this city he secured a good education. After the
completion of his education, he took up the trade of harness-maker, following
this in the footsteps of the two generations preceding him. He was thus em-
ployed for nineteen years and was considered a good workman. Subsequently
he entered the insurance business with his brother, under the firm style of
J. P. Van Nest Sons, and they have built up a large business in fire insurance,
theirs being considered one of the most important agencies in this city.
Mr. Van Nest is a Democrat in politics and in 1899 he was elected a mem-
ber of the city council from the fourth ward, and was re-elected in 1901. serv-
ing as president of that body during 1901 and 1902. In the spring of 1903
he was elected mayor of the city, and so eminently satisfactory was his ad-
ministration of the office that he has been twice re-elected, in 1905 and 1907.
Mr. Van Nest applied to the administration of the affairs of his official posi-
tion the same careful business principles which he would apply to his own
business affairs, and in his attitude towards public improvements he has been
progressive, though at the same time exercising a wise conservatism which
has been a guarantee against extravagance or a useless expenditure of the
city’s money. During his administration great strides have been made by the
city in the way of street paving, cement sidewalks, sewerage, and increase in
the city’s water supply. Not only have the material necessities of the city
been regarded, but considerable attention has been paid to the esthetic, and in
many ways the city has been beautified, being now considered one of the most
pleasing cities of its class in the state.
In 1905 Mayor Van Nest was appointed bv the judge of the common
pleas court, and re-appointed in 1908, a member of the soldiers’ relief com-
mittee of Wavne county, the appointment bearing special distinction from the
fact that he is the only man not a veteran of the Civil war who ever served on
this committee. The mayor is also second vice-president of the Wooster
Board of Trade.
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In 1887, *he subject was united in marriage to Amanda E. Ray, who was
born and reared in Wooster, and to them have been born two children, Fred,
deceased, and Florence H. The family reside in a pleasant and comfortable
home on Columbus avenue, and here the spirit of hospitality ever abides.
Fraternally Mayor Van Nest belongs to the Knights of Pythias, in which he
has risen to the Uniform Rank, and to the Fraternal Order of Eagles and
the Yeomen. He and his wife belong to the English Lutheran church, of
which thev are liberal supporters. The family occupy a position of promi-
nence in the social life of the community and all who know them hold them in
the highest regard.
HENRY H. STRAUSS.
Henry H. Strauss, president of the Orrville National Bank, has been a
potent factor in the commercial and social life of Orrville and Wayne county
for over forty years. He is one of those solid men of brain and substance so
essential to the material growth and prosperity of a community and whose
influence is willingly extended in behalf of every deserving enterprise that has
for its object the advancement or moral welfare of the community.
The Strauss name is found to be one of the early pioneer family names in
America. The family is of German origin and the progenitor of the family
in the New World is thought to be Nicholas Strauss, a native of the Father-
land, who came to America in 1732. Henry Strauss, paternal grandfather
of the subject, was born in Pennsylvania, in which state several generations of
the family lived and reared their families.
Peter Strauss, father of the subject of this biography, was born in
Northampton county, Pennsylvania, removing when a young man to Saegers-
town, Crawford county, that state. He was a farmer and pursued that call-
ing with fair success. In 1850 he removed to Wayne county, Ohio, and set-
tled on a farm in Plain township, where he continued to reside until his death,
which occurred when he was seventy-three years of age. He married Julia
Renner, who was also born in Northampton county, Pennsylvania. She pre-
ceded her husband in death a few years, dying at the age of sixty-seven years.
Of the six children born to this worthy couple, three are now living, namely:
Abigail, the wife of John Martin, of Reedsburg, Ohio: Marietta, the wife of
William Gill, of Plain township, this county, and Henry PI., subject of this
sketch.
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Henry H. Strauss was born on the parental farmstead at Saegerstown,
Crawford county, Pennsylvania, on August 15, 1839, and removed to Wayne
county, Ohio, with his parents in 1850. His early life was spent on the farm,
and he attended the public schools during his boyhood, supplementing this by
attendance at the Wooster high school and the Fredericksburg Academy.
Eight years were spent in teaching school during the winter months and at-
tending school during the summer seasons. In 1867 Mr. Strauss came to
Orrville where he has since been a recognized influence. In that year he en-
gaged in the dry goods business with the late Henry Shrieber, the partner-
ship, however, only continuing six months. In 1868 he and the late C. R.
Beckley bought a dry goods stock located in the present stand of W. L. Des-
Yoignes. Here Mr. Strauss was in business for twenty years, buying Mr.
Beckley's interest after twelve years of partnership. Here was first estab-
lished Mr. Strauss’s splendid reputation for honorable and upright business
methods, which his long and successful career has since maintained inviolate.
In 1881 the Orrville Banking Company, a private bank, was organized,
and Mr. Strauss, being one of the organizers, became the cashier, accepting
the position with reluctance. Being at this time engaged in the mercantile
business, he divided his time between the bank and the store until 1888, when
he sold the store and since that year he has devoted his time exclusively and
continuously to the bank.
On July 3; 1902, the bank was reorganized as the Orrville National
Bank and its capital stock increased to fifty thousand dollars. The bank is
one of the solid financial institutions of northern Ohio. At its reorganization
as a national bank, Mr. Strauss was elected president, which title designates
his present official position with the bank.
Mr. Strauss's other business interests include a directorship in the Orr-
ville Bedding Company and numerous other investments. He Its also ex-
tensive land interests, having a fine farm in Greene township, one in Baugh-
man township and part owner of one in Chippewa township.
Mr. Strauss was married September 20, 1870, to Alary Leinninger, who
was born in Dalton, Wayne county, Ohio. She is a daughter of Frederick
and Anna Leinninger, both of whom were natives of Germany. Four chil-
dren constitute their family, namely : Bessie E., who holds a responsible posi-
tion in the bank; Frank L., cashier of the bank; Harry H. graduated from
Wooster University in 1904, was later a student at Chicago University. Chi-
cago, and was professor and instructor in Latin and Greek at Miami Univer-
sity, Oxford. Ohio; he has been a member of the faculties at Tullane College
New Orleans, the State University of Iowa and the State University of North
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Dakota, and next year will return to Tullane College as an instructor; Dr.
Robert Todd is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and is now a
successful dentist at Alliance, Ohio.
Mr. and Mrs. Strauss are members of the Presbyterian church, of which
Mr. Strauss is an elder and has served on the official board. Fraternally,
Mr. Strauss is a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the
Knights of Honor. Politically, he affiliates with the Republican party, having
cast his first vote for Abraham Lincoln. He served for twenty years on the
Orrville city school board and manifests a keen interest in educational mat-
ters.
Mr. Strauss as a business man is a representative type of that fine old
school where the highest integrity, implacable justice and rugged honesty are
the prerequisites to success. Personally, he is of kindly demeanor, a whole-
some optimism pervading his nature, and his engaging frankness disclosing
a heart mellowed with human sympathies.
CAPT. JAMES B. TAYLOR.
A man who stands admittedly among the leaders of the legal profession
in the northern part of the Buckeye state, where he has long been practicing in
all the courts, often handling many of the most important cases on the various
dockets, is Capt. James B. Taylor, of Wooster, Wayne county. Being cour-
teous, well informed and enterprising, he is recognized as one of the repre-
sentative men of a community widely noted for the high order of its citizen-
ship, and in his life record is much that should be an incentive to the youth
standing at the parting of the ways, whose destinies are matters for future
years to determine, to have higher ambitions and accomplish more for their
fellow men, for his life has always been led along a plane of high endeavor,
always consistent with the truth in its higher forms and ever in keeping with
honorable principles, while at the same time he has l>een eminently successful
in his chosen profession. He is the scion of pioneer ancestors of the most
sterling qualities who did much in their day for the communities in which they
lived, and the Captain is a worthy descendant of his forbears, thus for many
reasons, not the least of which is the fact that he was one of the patriotic sons
of the North, who, when the tocsin of war sounded, left his comfortable
hearthstone and his business affairs to do. what he could toward saving the
national union from disruption and dishonor, he is accorded conspicuous men-
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tion in this work, along with other worthy citizens of Wayne county, whose
lives have been directed along proper channels.
James B. Taylor was born August 24, 1840, at Fredericksburg, Ohio, and
his useful life has been spent within the borders of his native county of
Wayne, for the most part, for he believed that greater opportunities existed
for him right here at home rather than in some remote locality, and, judging
from the eminent success he has achieved and the good he has done the peo-
ple of this community, he was wise in coming to such a conclusion. He is
the son of James and Elisabeth (Curtis) Taylor, both natives of Virginia,
each representing a fine old Southern family, the mother being of original
Quaker stock.
James B. Taylor was the youngest member of a family of nine children,
and his boyhood was spent in the quiet, sequestered village of his birth, in
much the same manner as other youths of his station in life and environments.
He started to the common schools early and made rapid progress, for at the
age of sixteen he was a teacher in the public schools. It being necessary for
him to map out his career and “work out his own salvation” practically un-
aided, he taught during the winter months and attended school through the
summer and made general preparation for a higher life work. For a time the
intervals between his teaching periods were profitably employed as a student
at the Fredericksburg Academy; later he entered the junior class at West-
minster College, Pennsylvania, from which institution he was graduated in
June, 1861, having made a splendid record there. In the ensuing autumn he
did a very commendable work by organizing and opening Smithville Academy,
in the superintendency and control of which he remained for one year, when,
notwithstanding the flattering outlook for the institution, Mr. Taylor decided
to cast his lot with the Federal troops, the rebellion then being in full blast.
He surrendered the control of the academy to Prof. John B. Eberly, who for
many years conducted it with remarkable success, the foundation having been
securely and broadly laid by Mr. Taylor. He entered the service as second
lieutenant. August 15, 1862. in the One Hundred and Twentieth Regiment
Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and. having proved to be a most capable and gallant
soldier, he was promoted to first lieutenant, February 18. 1863. later, on
March 23d. following, to captain of Company H. and by reason of the con-
solidation of this regiment with the One Hundred and Fourteenth Ohio Vol-
unteer Infantry, he was mustered out November 27. 1864. The first regiment
he was in bore a meritorious and conspicuous part in the campaign of the
Mississippi river and its tributaries, and C aptain Taylor shared in its vicissi-
tudes and conflicts. In the swamps of C hickasaw Bavou. at Arkansas Post,
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at Thompson’s Hill, under Grant at the siege of Vicksburg, at Big Black
river, at Jackson, under Banks on the Red river, he bravely led his command,
and with an army of invincible soldiers he united with them in the triumphant
victories of long and arduous campaigns.
Returning to civil life, Captain Taylor took up the study of medicine
in the spring of 1865, in Fredericksburg, with Doctor Martin, and toward the
close of that year went to the University of Michigan as a student of medicine,
but soon thereafter abandoned the same, believing that the law held greater
opportunities for one of his tastes. He made rapid strides in this department
and was graduated in the spring of 1867 in the law department of the Uni-
versity of Michigan. He returned to Wayne county and opened an office at
Orrville, where he soon had a satisfactory practice which has continued to
grow until he has long since been rated among the leading members of the
Wayne county bar. Believing that the city of Wooster held greater
advantages for himself and family, he moved here in April 1882, formed a
law partnership with ex-Probate Judge Isaac Johnson in 1888, which con-
tinued witil the tragic death of the latter.
Captain Taylor has prospered by reason of his close application to busi-
ness, and he had one of the most attractive homes in the city, located amid
beautiful surroundings on North Market street, modern, of attractive archi-
tecture, located in the midst of fine lawns, through which wind inviting walks,
overarched by splendid trees and shrubbery. On Christmas eve of 1906, a
year after the death of his wife, he transferred his beautiful home to a city
hospital, and it yet continues as a hospital, and ought to be a monument to his
generosity and the thoughtfulness of his wife, who in health had planned for
just such a use of the property.
Captain Taylor’s wife was Emilie Emmett, the daughter of John and
Eliza Emmett, and whose grandfather laid out the town of Emmettsburg,
Pennsylvania. Prior to their marriage Mrs. Taylor was the principal of the
schools at Fredericksburg, Ohio. To them were born six children, three of
whom survive, Harry E. Taylor, manager of a manufacturing establishment
at Orrville. Rob C. Taylor, a law partner, and Josephine, now the wife of Rev.
Fred J. Slagle, who are spending a year in Scotland. Captain Taylor is a
member of the Presbyterian church at Wooster, a Mason, a member of the
Grand Army of the Republic, and of the Royal Arcanum.
The Captain is a practitioner of an earnest, cultivated, enlightened and
inquiring mind. His leisure hours are employed among his books and legal
authorities. He permits no shrinkage in his hours of study and work, for
he believes in labor, that there is true dignity in it, and he is well versed in all
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the intricate recesses of the law, and in the court room he is at once genteel,
alert, keen, discriminating, analytical, logical and often eloquent, never failing
to deeply impress his jury. He is a vigorous as well as an independent thinker
and he always has the courage of his convictions. He is essentially cosmo-
politan in his ideas, a man of the people in all the term implies and in the best
sense of the word a representative type of that strong American manhood,
which commands and retains respect by reason of inherent merit, sound sense
and correct conduct. He has so impressed his individuality upon his com-
munity as to win the confidence and esteem of his fellow citizens, who regard
his career as eminently honorable and useful in all its phases, for it has been
a strenuous one and of a character to benefit others, and, measured by the
accepted standards of excellence, his life has been fraught with great good to
those with whom he has come into contact.
THOMAS KIRBY DAVIS, D. D.
This venerable and highly esteemed exponent of the life of the lowly
Nazarene has led a life that is worthy of commendation and emulation by
the youth standing at the parting of the ways, for it has been one of un-
selfish service and of unswerving rectitude, self-sacrifice and devotion to
the higher duty. Thomas Kirby Davis was born in Chambersburg, Penn-
sylvania, February 11, 1826. He prepared for college at the Chambersburg
Academy, entered Yale College, from which he was graduated in 1845;
studied theology at Princeton Seminary, and was ordained as a Presbyterian
minister by the presbytery of Carlisle in 1850. His pastoral charges in
his early ministry included Bedford, Schellsburg, Middletown, Pennsylvania;
Mansfield, and Hayes ville, Ohio. At the latter place he was also professor
of languages in the Vermilion Institute. He was stated supply of the First
Presbyterian church of San Francisco, California, of the First Presbyterian
church of Los Angeles, California, and also of the First church at Stockton,
that state: also of many other churches during the years he has been resid-
ing in Wooster. He was a member and secretary of the board of trustees
of Vermilion Institute. At the first meeting of the board of trustees of the
University of Wooster, held in December, 1866, Doctor Davis was appointed
one of a committee of three whose duty it was to go over the state of
Ohio and ascertain if the Presbyterian churches of the state were ready to
endow a Presbyterian college. Doctor Davis accordingly resigned his charge
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at Mansfield and began to work for the University of Wooster on the first
of January, 1867. After laboring very successfully for nearly a year, he
resigned to accept a call to Hayesville and Vermilion Institute.
In the year 1871 Mr. Davis was called to Wooster as financial secre-
tary and he has lived here, working for the university ever since. He was
a member of the board of trustees of this institution from 1876 to 1899 and
secretary of the board from 1876 to 1908. He was made librarian of the
university in 1877 and has held that position to the present time (1910).
He was honored with the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1880 by Pennsyl-
vania College, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and by Parsons College, at Fair-
field, Iowa.
Doctor Davis was married on August 14. 1851, to Marv H. Proctor,
of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She was born in that city, the daughter of an
elder in the Presbyterian church. Her mother's maiden name was Mary
Officer, of an old and well-known family of Carlisle. After a long and
beautiful life of Christian service, Mrs. Davis was called to her rest on
March 28, 1908. To this union the following children were born: William
Stewart, connected with the Standard Publishing Company, of Cincinnati,
Ohio: Miriam M., of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who holds an important posi-
tion in the reference department of the public library there; Janet M. is
the wife of Dr. James Wallace, who for twenty years was president of Mac-
alester College at St. Paul ; he was then on leave of absence three years
as professor of New Testament Greek in Doctor White's Bible School,
New York City. He then returned to Macalester College and has charge of
the Bible department. John Proctor is a Presbyterian minister, at present
pastor of a church at Austin, Minnesota; Elizabeth R. is at home with her
father ; Alice S. has a responsible position in the Ohio state library at Colum-
bus. These children have all been well educated and the wholesome home
environment in which they were reared is clearly reflected in their daily lives.
Doctor Davis has given his heart and the greater part of his life and
service to the founding and building up of an institution of learning that
would be so broad and comprehensive in its scope as to include the teachings
of the Lord Jesus Christ as the most vitally important and necessary part
of its curriculum and influence. He has accomplished much toward amelio-
rating the condition of his fellow men, often laboring with disregard for
his own welfare if thereby he might attain the object he sought — to make
some one better and happier. Such a life is an incentive to the youth whose
fortunes and records are matters for the future to determine, for his life
has been singularly free from all that is deteriorating or paltry, his influence
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at all times uplifting, and thousands of people have been made better for
having known him ; however, he has never sought public praise or the plaudits
of men, preferring to reap the rewards of a clear conscience and the approval
of the Heavenly Father.
CHARLES R. SELL.
Among the citizens of Canaan township, Wayne county, Ohio, who have
built up a comfortable home and surrounded themselves with a valuable
landed estate and personal property, few have achieved a higher degree of suc-
cess in the same length of time and under such circumstances as Charles R.
Sell, for he has been diligent and prospered in the face of all obstacles and at
the same time has retained the excellent reputation of his forbears. He was
born in Canaan township, this county, on the old Sell homestead, March 9,
1863, the son of Jacob and Ellen (Reed) Sell, the latter the daughter of
George Reed, who came to Stark county from Pennsylvania in the pioneer
days and devoted his life to fanning. A detailed review of Mr. Sell’s father
and paternal ancestors will be found on another page of this work under the
caption of W. Frank Sell.
Charles R. Sell was educated in the district schools of his native com-
munity, alternating schooling with farm work, — in fact, he lived on the home
place until he married, when he moved to a farm of sixty-one acres which his
father gave him. His wedding occurred in August, 1885, an(l his life com-
panion was Emma Fetzer, daughter of Peter and Sarah Fetzer, pioneers of
Wayne county. Jacob, the father of Peter Fetzer, was the oldest member of
the Fetzer family that came to Wayne county. He took up timbered land
here which he cleared and on which he made a good home, becoming prosper-
ous for those days.
After getting a good start on his first place, Mr. Sell moved to a farm of
eighty-two acres, the Fetzer homestead, where he has since resided. He has
added to his original purchase, his farm now consisting of one hundred and
forty-three acres. It is well improved and the soil has been so skillfully man-
aged that it has retained its original fertility. Fie has a beautifully located
and commodious home and substantial outbuildings. He has always followed
general farming in a manner that shows him to be a man of good judgment
and persistent methods. Much of his regular income is derived from success-
ful stock raising. He always has various kinds of good livestock, being an
especially good judge of cattle.
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To Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Sell the following children have been born :
Mrs. Otto Tschantz; Grace Louella; Sadie, deceased; Ida, Dessa and Helen.
Mr. and Mrs. Sell and their family are members of the Presbyterian
church. Politically, Mr. Sell votes the Republican ticket, and while he does
not take any special interest in local political affairs, his support may always
be depended upon in all worthy movements for the benefit of Wayne county,
whether political, educational, material or civic.
DAVID BLOUGH.
One of the substantial and worthy agriculturists of the vicinity of Sterl-
ing, Wayne county, is David Blough, where he has long maintained his home,
his fine farm representing much hard labor, but he has ever been known to be
a man of energy and determination in business affairs. Indolence and idle-
ness are entirely foreign to his nature and his continued activity in the
management and development of his property has made him one of the
valuable citizens of this locality.
Mr. Blough was born in Somerset county, Pennsylvania, July 7, 1826,
the son of David and Mary Blough, who came to Wayne county, Ohio, in
1836. David Blough, Sr., bought the farm on which the subject of this
sketch now resides. The place was formerly owned by a Mr. Steiner. This
farm contains one hundred and sixty acres which the members of this family
have tilled in such a manner as to get the best results possible and have kept
the soil in a very fertile condition. When the father purchased this place
only a small part of it had been cleared and on it stood a few log buildings,
but with the assistance of his sons he cleared and improved the place and
established a good home. His family consisted of five children, David,
Joseph, Henry, Moses and Jacob. Of this number, David and Joseph are
the only ones living. Joseph, Moses and Jacob were drafted into the Union
army during the Civil war, but they hired substitutes. The grandfather of
the subject was also named David Blough. He was born in Coblitz, Germany,
from which country he came to America in an early day. He was the father
of twenty-one sons; whether there were any daughters in his family is not
known. The grandparents of the subject on both sides of the house lived
and died in Pennsylvania.
David Blough, of this review, was married on April 11, 1854, to Lydia
Curts. He made his home on his present farm since he was ten years of age.
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He carried on general farming in a very successful manner during his active
life and for several years he has lived retired on the old farm, enjoying the
fruits of his former years of well directed labor. He is a member of the
Amish Mennonite church, and is a Democrat in politics, and has been town-
ship supervisor.
The following children have been born to the subject and wife: Sarah,
wife of the late Jacob Burkey ; John, who died in 1875 : Cassie, now Mrs. John
Burkey; Samuel, Noah, Eli and Neri D.
Neri D. Blough was educated in the home schools and grew to maturity
on the home farm on which he has lived all his life. He has had charge of the
active farming for a number of years and he has proven to be a very aide and
industrious agriculturist. He was married in 1895 to Katherine Krupp, and
this union has resulted in the birth of the following children : Della, Henry,
Nola, Edna, John, Carrie, Wilma, Eva, Fem.
Neri D. Blough, like his honored father, is highly respected in this neigh-
borhood. He is a member of the Amish Mennonite church, and politically he
is a Democrat.
WESLEY HENRY ZAUGG.
The gentleman whose name forms the caption to this article, who was
for several years the efficient and accommodating assistant cashier of the
Citizens National Bank of Wooster, and who recently entered upon his
duties as treasurer of Wayne county, to which office he was elected, is emi-
nently entitled to representation in a work of this character. At all times
a true and loyal citizen, faithful to the best interests of his community, he
has always commanded unequivocal confidence and esteem, standing high
in the regard of his business associates and in the respect of the general
public. His influence has ever been wielded in the promotion of the higher
interests of the community, and all worthy agencies have enlisted his earnest
support.
A native son of the Buckeye state. Wesley H. Zaugg was born in Sugar-
creek township. Wayne county, on June 26. 1867. He is the son of Samuel
and Cecile (Calame) Zaugg. both of whom are natives of the little republic
of Switzerland, though they were married in Wayne county. Samuel Zaugg
came to the United States when twenty-one years old, and, coming .at once
to Wayne county, he located on a farm in Saltcreek township which he pur-
chased and on which he lived for thirty-five years, removing to Mt. Eaton
about a year ago, on the death of his wife. They were the parents of the
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following children: Clara married a Mr. Simpson and lives in Chicago,
Illinois ; Fred S. lives in Omaha, Nebraska, is a successful minister at Omaha,
built the First Reformed church in that city and is now engaged in the
erection of the Second church of the same denomination; John A., who is
engaged in the furniture and undertaking business at Apple Creek, Ohio;
Ida, who made her home with her brother Fred at Omaha, married W.
Vecht and lives on a farm near Canal Fulton, Stark county, Ohio; Florence
is the wife of a Mr. Michel, of Cleveland, Ohio; Elmer H. is a teacher in
Japan, being at present located at Sendai ; Pearl is a stenographer at Wooster
University; Zena is the wife of Dr. C. X. Clark, coroner of Wayne county,
and residing at Mount Eaton ; Wesley, the subject of this sketch.
The subject's paternal grandparents were Jacob and Anna ( Stettler)
Zaugg, who came from their native Switzerland to America in 1853 and
located in Saltcreek township, this county, where they purchased a small
farm. Here they lived until their respective deaths, the husband dying in
about 1879 and his widow about ten years later. They were persons of
many estimable qualities and were highly regarded in their community.
Wesley H. Zaugg was reared on the home farm and secured his educa-
tion in the common schools of the township and in the Normal School at
Ada, this state. He early became inured to the labors of the farm and
directed his attention in that direction until coming to Wooster. During
the meanwhile he was also successfully engaged in teaching school, taking
charge of his first school at the age of seventeen years. During the following
thirteen years he continued to teach in Sugarcreek, Saltcreek and Paint town-
ships. In 1896 Mr. Zaugg went to Europe in the interest of several persons
who were heirs to estates there, and during the following year Mr. Zaugg
was busily engaged in settling these affairs, some of the settlements being
very hotly contested. Mr. Zaugg’s connection with the affairs in question
was eminently satisfactory to the interested parties here. In 1900 Mr. Zaugg
was appointed deputy probate judge of Wayne county,. serving in this capacity
over a year. In 1901 he became teller in the Wavne County National Bank,
remaining there five years. In December, 1906, he accepted a position as
assistant cashier in the Citizens Bank, and continued to occupy this position
until taking the office of county treasurer, which he is now filling. He is
otherwise interested in financial institutions, being president of the Farmers
and Merchants’ Bank of Smith ville, Ohio, and a member of the board of
directors of the Farmers’ Banking Company, at Sterling, Ohio. He is a
director of the Wooster Machine Company and secretary-treasurer of the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Valley River Coal Company, of Grafton, West Virginia. In 1897 Mr. Zaugg
commenced the study of law with Judge H. B. Swartz, of Wooster, and
would undoubtedly have made a good lawyer, as he has natural talents
which would have qualified him especially for this profession, but circum-
stances altered his plans and he was led into the banking business instead.
He has exhibited business qualities of the highest order and has an enviable
standing among those who are familiar with his work in the various posi-
tions in which he has been placed. The taxpayers of Wayne county made no
mistake in selecting him as the custodian of the public moneys and he will
undoubtedly give to the office of county treasurer the same careful and
faithful attention which has characterized him in other relations.
On March 27, 1900, Mr. Zaugg took unto himself a helpmeet in the
person of Lena Tschantz, daughter of Christian Tschantz, a wholesale cheese
dealer at Alliance, Ohio. She was born near Mount Eaton, Wayne county,
and her family was living at Kidron, this county, when Mr. Zaugg was
teaching school there. Here began the acquaintance, which ripened into a
warmer affection and culminated in marriage. The union has been blessed
with two children, Miriam Grace, born July 30, 1902, and Mary Cecile, born
April 18, 1904. Mr. and Mrs. Zaugg are members of the Reformed church
at Wooster, of which Mr. Zaugg has served as deacon for eight years and
superintendent of the Sabbath school for six years. He belongs to the Royal
Arch Masons, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Knights of
Pythias and the Fraternal Order of Eagles. He possesses a genial disposition
and has won a host of warm personal friends, who admire him because of
his sterling worth. He is an accomplished and fluent speaker in four lan-
guages, Swiss, German, French and English.
WILLIAM HOWARD ROSS.
The Ross family have been well known and influential in public and pri-
vate life in both Wayne and Holmes counties since the early days, one of
the most progressive of the younger generation being William Howard Ross,
who was born in Ripley township, Holmes county, Ohio, September 18, 1879.
His paternal ancestors came to the United States from Ireland and located
in Pennsylvania, from which state his grandfather. John Ross, emigrated to
Wayne county. Ohio, and here he was married to Sarah Tracy. William F.
Ross, father of the subject, was born in 1843. We received an excellent
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education and entered upon a teachers career, which he continued through-
out his subsequent life, becoming known as one of the leading educators of
the county, his teaching being confined exclusively to Holmes and Wayne
counties. His death occurred on June 1, 1893. The maternal ancestors of
William H. Ross emigrated to America from England and settled in Lou-
doun county, Virginia, from which place the subject’s grandfather, James
Swart, came to Wayne county, Ohio, settling in Franklin township, and
there he was married to Rosanna Hafhill, and it was there that the mother
of William H. Ross was born in 1837, her maiden name being Catherine M.
Swart. James Swart was a farmer, a justice of the peace, and one of the
associate judges of the district court. He was a prominent man in his
community. The Swart family later moved to a farm in Ripley township,
Holmes county, Ohio, where James Swart served as a justice of the peace
during many terms. Catherine M. Swart was engaged in teaching dis-
trict schools in Wayne county until her marriage, in 1866, to William F.
Ross. After their marriage they resided in Franklin township, this county,
for several years and later moved to Ripley township, Holmes county.
To Mr. and Mrs. William F. Ross four children were born, namely:
Julia Blanche, a school teacher; a son died in infancy; Henry E., now a well-
to-do farmer in Clinton township, Wayne county, this state; William How-
ard, subject of this sketch. The father of these children was called to close
his earthly account in 1893, leaving Catherine M., his widow, who still re-
sides on the old home place in Ripley township, Holmes county, and the
two sons, Henry E. and W. Howard, the youngest, who was then but thir-
teen years of age.
Although but a mere boy, the subject of this sketch engaged in growing
berries for market when he was but thirteen years of age, attending the
district schools at Bigelow during the winter months, and when nineteen years
of age he commenced teaching, having applied himself very assiduously to
his text-books and receiving a good education. His first school was that in
his home district and he continued to teach for four years. Desiring a higher
training than he had received in the common schools, he entered the Ada
Normal, Ohio, and later studied at the Valparaiso Normal College, Valpa-
raiso, Indiana. Deciding that the law held greater attractions for him than
the school room, he took a course in the Valparaiso Normal School, from
which he was graduated in 1901, receiving the degree of Bachelor of Laws.
He made a splendid record in that institution and was honored by his class
by being elected its president. Being then without money and realizing the
financial difficulties that confront a young lawyer, he again taught school
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
for two years, then engaged in the grocery business at Shreve, Ohio, with
\Y. L. Porter, the firm being known as Porter & Ross, in which business he
remained for three years, during which time he attended the bar examination
and was admitted to practice law in Ohio.
Mr. Ross was married in August. 1902, to Mabel Grace Garrett, one
of the six daughters of Alfred A. Garrett, of Shreve, Ohio. She, like her
husband, was a school teacher, having received a liberal education at Ada,
Ohio, and at the University of Wooster. One winsome daughter. Myrtle
Evelyn, has graced this union.
When Mr. Ross gave up the grocery business he opened a real estate
and law office in Shreve, Ohio, and, by hard work and close attention to
business, has succeeded in building up quite a lucrative patronage, soon be-
coming an active member of the Wayne county bar. The death of Hon.
Martin L. Smyser and the election of Judge William E. Weygandt, both oc-
curring in 1908, took from the firm of Smyser, Weygandt & Weiser two of
its members, and on January 1, 1909. Mr. Ross became the junior member
of the firm of Weiser & Ross, which firm succeeded the firm of Smyser,
Weygandt & Weiser, and they are now enjoying an extensive law practice
in Wayne and adjoining counties, having one of the largest and best law
libraries in Ohio.
Mr. Ross is an active Democrat, always found in the front ranks working
for the success of his party. He and Mrs. Ross are both members of the
Methodist church and take an active interest in the welfare of their neigh-
bors and the general public. When asked to what he attributed his success
in life, Mr. Ross replied: “Whatever measure of success I may have at-
tained, I owe to the youthful impressions I received from a kind and godly
father, to a sainted mother and faithful wife.”
CHARLES A. WEISER.
Individual enterprise, which is so justly the boast of the American peo-
ple, is strikingly exhibited in the career of the gentleman whose name forms
the caption of this sketch. While transmitting to posterity the record of
such a life, it is with the hope of instilling into the minds of those who come
after, the important lesson that honor and station are sure rewards of in-
dividual exertion. That the career of such a person, besides being treasured
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in the hearts of relatives and friends, should have its public record also, is
peculiarly proper, because a knowledge of men whose substantial fame rests
upon their attainments and character must exert a wholesome influence upon
the rising generation. The life of Mr. Weiser has indeed been a busy and
successful one and the record he has made at the local bar is worthy of
the attention of the youth who would learn the intrinsic essence of individu-
ality and its influence in molding public opinion and giving character and
stability to the community.
Charles A. Weiser was born in Lehigh county, Pennsylvania, July 23,
1861. His father was of German ancestry. He worked many years as a
miner; he married Angelina Knauss, her family having been among the
early emigrants to America from Germany. All along the line of the an-
cestry of Mr. Weiser on both sides of the house we find men and women
of sterling character, plain, industrious and honest people. Several of his
maternal ancestors took an active part in the American war of the Revolu-
tion. The first of the Weiser family in America were John and Paul, who
emigrated to this country some time in the seventeenth century. Each A\*as
the father of twelve children and they were pioneer supporters of the Mo-
ravian church.
Charles E. Weiser was reared and educated in his native state; however,
he attended the Ada Normal Institute after locating in this state. Coming
to Ohio in 1879, he located in Greene township, Wayne county, later moving
to Baughman township, where he continued to reside on a farm which he
successfully cultivated until 1899, when he moved to Wooster. In his boy-
hood days he found employment in and around the mines, where his father
was engaged driving coal wagons and indulging in the diverse and various
experiences of the monotonous and precarious mining life. After he came
to Ohio, Tie worked upon a farm, his efforts, energies and industry being re-
warded bv a satisfactory measure of success. He at once took an active in-
terest in the welfare of his township and soon came to be recognized as one
of Baughman's most representative citizens. He was especially interested in
the progress of Baughman township, advocating all enterprises that would
advance the prosperity of his fellow citizens, always taking a very pronounced
interest in political campaigns and, being a loyal Democrat and in good
standing with that political organization, he was singled out by party leaders
for important public trusts, having been chosen as candidate for the Ohio
Legislature and was elected in 1889 to the sixty-ninth General Assembly of
the state, and so faithfully did he perform the duties falling to him by virtue
of this exalted office that he was re-elected in 1893, making a most satisfac-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
tory record a second term. He was well qualified for the position of legis-
lator for he was well informed on the leading political and economic ques-
tions of the day. He served also in Baughman township as a member of the
board of education for many years, during which time the cause of educa-
tion in that part of the county was greatly augmented.
Turning his attention to the law, Mr. Weiser began reading law in the
office of \Y. E. Weygandt, then prosecuting attorney of Wayne county, and,
making rapid progress in the same, he was admitted to the bar in June,
1898. Not long afterwards he removed to Wooster and opened an office,
since which time he has been actively engaged in the practice of his chosen pro-
fession, having been very successful from the first. He formed a partnership
with Mr. Weygandt and the combination proved to be a very strong one. In
December, 1905, he formed a partnership with Judge M. K. Smyser, the firm
name being Smyser, Weygandt & Weiser, which continued until the death of
Judge Smyser.
In the year 1882 Mr. Weiser married Malinda Shafer, daughter of
John and Margareth (Sickman) Shafer, one of the early pioneers of Baugh-
man township, Wayne county, who followed farming. To the subject and
his wife six children were born : John, Forest, Clyde, Bessie, Glen and Perry.
John, the oldest son, is teaching at Concord, Ohio. Forest is salesman in
a large establishment in Cleveland. Clyde is a salesman in the shoe depart-
ment of the Pocock Shoe Company, Cleveland, Ohio. The other children
are at home. Fraternally, Mr. Weiser is a'member of the Fraternal Order
of Eagles, and the Knights of Pythias. Religiously, he belongs to the
English Reformed church of Wooster, to which all the family belong and
of which they are liberal supporters. Politically, he is a Democrat and he has
been president of the city council for seven years.
While a member of the Legislature, Mr. Weiser very faithfully and
ably championed the rights of his constituents, having made his influence
felt in the deliberations of that body, and he never failed to be respectfully
listened to in all his counseling, his arguments carrying undisputed weight.
In the practice of law in Wooster he has attained to a laudable position in
his profession, and his reputation for honesty, integrity, straightforward-
ness of character and fidelity to his clients and all confidences and trusts
committed to him, whether professional or otherwise, is firmly established.
His pathways are along the moral levels of the world, and he preserves the
symmetry of a noble life by emphasizing his attachments to the higher ideals
of the mind: by defending the truth, the right, and by aiming to preserve
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567
the perfect proportions of truth. As a counselor he is guarded in his ex-
pression of opinions, deliberate, wary, and cautious in arriving at conclu-
sions, seeking to attain a thorough knowledge of the cause before the ad-
ministration of advice, or the commencement of action. In the trial of
cases he is self-possessed, not easily irritated or excited, and conducts his
proceedings in hand with fairness to all parties concerned, strictly obeying
the canons of courtesy to the court and opposing counsel. Considering the
fact that he has come .up to an honored position in the affairs of his county
and state through his own persistent efforts, without aid from any source,
he is justly deserving of the high esteem which all classes freely accord him.
CHARLES MILTON GRAY.
A highly respected citizen of Wooster, Wayne county, Ohio, is Charles
M. Gray, a native of this city, where he was born January 6, 1859. He re-
ceived his education in the public schools of Wooster. After completing his
schooling he engaged in the coal and builders' supply business with his father,
having continued the same line to the present time with unabated success,
owing to his thorough training and excellent business ability. In 1891 he be-
came associated with A. Plank in a flouring mill and grain business, the firm
name being Plank & Gray. Mr. Gray is president of the Citizens' National
Bank, and president of the Peoples Savings and Loan Company. He is a
stockholder in the Wooster Machine Company. He carries on an extensive
business in coal and builders' supplies under the firm name of Gray & Son.
He has been very successful at whatever he has turned his attention to, owing
to his careful business methods and his desire to please those with whom he has
dealings, striving to be fair at all times. He is a member of the local Board of
Trade and is filling the position of treasurer of the same, being one of the
most active and influential members of this important organization.
Mr. Gray was married on August 9, 1893, to Nellie Gray, the cultured
and accomplished daughter of Sylvester Gray, of Wooster, of the firm of
Gray & Rhoades Granite Works. One child has graced this union, a son,
known as James Sylvester Gray.
In his fraternal relations. Mr. Gray is a member of the Masonic order,
having attained the thirty-second degree. He is past eminent commander of
Wooster Comm^nderv; he also belongs to the Royal Arcanum, taking a very
active interest in all these orders. The Lutheran church, of which he is a
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
member, embodies his religious creed. Mrs. Gray is also a member of the
same. Mr. Gray is one of the trustees of the congregation. He is a Repub-
lican in politics and for some time has taken a more or less active interest in
local affairs. The Gray home, at No. 158 East North street, is one of the most
attractive and commodious in the city.
CAPT. WESLEY WELLS SPEAR.
What greater badge of honor could be bestowed upon a man than to
allude to him as one of the “boys in blue,” who readily sacrificed the pleas-
ures of home and business opportunities to do what he could in saving the
honor of the old flag? One of this brave number is Capt. Wesley W. Spear,
an interesting and deserving citizen of Wooster, Wayne county, who was
born in that city December 28, 1835, the son of William Spear, who was
born near Shippingberg, Pennsylvania, in 1803, and who came to Wayne
county about 1827. He was a cabinetmaker by trade, and he located in
Wooster where he established a shop and led a very active life here until his
death, in 1890, at the advanced age of eighty -seven years. He was an
honest, hardworking and highly respected man. He married Malinda Wells,
a native of York county, Pennsylvania. Her father conducted a whip fac-
tory at Wellsville, that county, and the town derived its name from the family.
Mrs. Spear was born in 1808 and died the same year as her husband, 1890, —
in fact only four days after her husband passed away. To them seven chil-
dren were born, four of whom lived to maturity, Wesley W.. of this review,
being a twin brother of William Fletcher, who died about five years ago.
Caroline Spear, and Olive, widow of Rev. Janes Mendenhall, both of whom
reside in Arkansas, are the other children.
Captain Spear has always made Wooster his home, although he has
traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. On August 6, 1862, he enlisted
in Company D, One Hundred and Twentieth Regiment Ohio Volunteer In-
fantry, and very faithfully served for a period of three years. He was mus-
tered in at Camp Mansfield. Ohio, as a private, and he proved to be a very
capable soldier from the first, having been commissioned a second lieutenant
and a few days later was made first lieutenant. He had a varied and inter-
esting experience during the service, taking part in many battles and engage-
ments, among them being the battle of Chickasaw Ravou. Arkansas Post.
Thompson’s Hill, Champion’s Hill and the siege of Vicksburg, under General
Sherman. He was wounded at Jackson. Mississippi. July 12, 1863, having
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CAPT. W. W SPEAR
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569
been shot in the right groin with a minie ball. This brought him home
on a furlough, but, recovering, he later rejoined his regiment in western
Louisiana, where the brigade was divided and Mr. Spear was stationed on
Colonel Shelton's staff, doing staff duty that winter at Peackamon, Louisiana.
Again in active service, he was with his company going up Red river when
the boat which was transporting them was fired on and captured, their colonel
killed and about one-half of the company killed or captured. This necessi-
tated consolidation with the One Hundred and Fourteenth Ohio Regiment,
and Mr. Spear was made captain and given command of Company H, of
that regiment. As captain of that company he was in the siege of Fort
Blakeley at Mobile, also Spanish Fort there. Near the close of the war
Captain Spear was transferred to the Forty-eighth Regiment, Ohio Volun-
teers. and after a very eventful career he was mustered out of service at
Houston, Texas, October 17, 1865, after which he returned to Wooster,
and, with his father, engaged in the cabinetmaking and undertaking busi-
ness. After the war his eyesight began to fail gradually, and in 1885 he
became totally blind, and he has since lived in quiet retirement from the
world.
Captain Spear was married in 1858 to Anna M. Watt, who was born in
north Ireland and came to Philadelphia when five years of age with her
father, who went into the produce business there, later removing to Wooster,
Ohio, and continued the same line of business here for several years. Of
the seven children born to the Captain and wife, only two survive, namely:
Charles Wesley Spear, of Northampton, Massachusetts, and Jesse Watt
Spear, a conductor on the Pennsylvania railroad at Crestline, Ohio.
Captain Spear lives on West Liberty street in the home he purchased
in 1867. He belongs to the Grand Army of the Republic, being a charter
member of Given Post. Notwithstanding his affliction. Captain Spear is a
cheerful, genial and interesting man to talk to, who enjoys life, conscious
of the fact that he has performed his duty well and greater rewards await
him than his fellow-men have ever bestowed. A man of good health, of
snowy hair and beard, he is a picturesque character and is greatly admired
bv all who know him.
JOHN B. FRANCE.
In 1909 the oldest person in Wayne county, having been born in the
city of Wooster February 29, 1816, was John B. France, who first saw the
light of day in a log cabin three hundred feet from where he has lived most
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
of the years since 1840, the date of his marriage. He is the son of Philip
and Elizabeth (Swain) France, of Pennsylvania, but natives of Germany.
The father came to America in 1807, and to Wooster, Ohio, in 1811. He
was drafted into the war of 1812 service, served there, returned to Woos-
ter and here died in 1816. The same day of his death his daughter died,
and they were buried in the same grave.
The venerable old gentleman whose name heads this sketch, who is
now in his ninety-fifth year, has had a very thrilling and eventful career
and may well count the years of his pilgrimage as successful in most ways.
He attended the old-fashioned subscription schools and thereby gained a
good common education and mastered the plasterers, bricklayer’s and stone-
mason’s trades, commencing to learn this combination of useful trades when
but ten years of age. When of age he started in life for himself. It may
be stated in passing that as his father died when he was yet an infant,
that he was reared by his uncle, John Swain. In 1832 he ran away and joined
“Bill Sweet’s*' circus, and for a season or more played the role of the
“Drunken Sailor’' for that showman. Later he went to Detroit and other
points in Michigan, where he again took up his trade as bricklayer. Again
he lived in Wooster and for near a score of years followed contracting and
building in a most successful manner and accumulated considerable prop-
erty. He was among the early “forty-niners," who wended their lonely
way overland to Hangtown, California, where he mined and built the first
court house at Sacramento, for which he received twelve dollars per day
as overseer. He was known in the land of gold as “Frank Ohio." He re-
turned to Wheeling and Pittsburg and made a second overland trip to Cali-
fornia. going with the famous Dennison train with four hundred and twenty
men and one woman. He remained there until the fall of 1852 and came
home by way of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, being storm delayed near
the Sandwich islands for more than a month. After his return to Wooster,
he again resumed contracting and building. In 1853 he was appointed town
marshal for Wooster; was elected constable, served five or six years, and
was also deputy sheriff. From 1863 to 1868 he was sheriff of Wayne county
and for three years and three months was on the Allan Pinkerton detective
force in the West, and had many thrilling experiences. The next eight
years he followed farming, near Wooster. During the Civil war he was dep-
uty provost marshal three years. He conducted a jobbing and retail grocery
business at the same time and was thus engaged six years, during which
time, with war prices, he made much money on the rapid rise of merchandise,
especially sugar. Among his public building contracts may be named the
court house at Findlav, this state.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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In 1870 Mr. France erected the Academy of Music as his own property,
at Wooster, and for thirteen years he conducted the same. In 1883 he
raised it another story high and it still stands as a monument to his skill
and business foresight. At one time he held seventeen pieces of Wooster
property, but has in the last few years sold off much.
Mr. France is a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows,
and has been connected therewith since 1844. Politically, he is a stanch
Democrat, and has voted for every President since 1840. He was a mem-
ber of the Jacksonian Club here and also belonged to the Wayne County
Blues at an early date. In the Franklin Pierce campaign he was a member
of the Gunners’ Squad.
Of his domestic life it may be said that Mr. France has been twice
married, first in 1840 to Miama Flack, who died in 1880, the mother of
eight children, three of whom still survive, John J., Alice Smyser, and Mrs.
David Rickard, of Medina county, Ohio. He married for his second wife,
in 1882, Sarah M. Fraley, who died October 5, 1904. By this marriage there
was no issue.
At the ripe old age of ninety-four and more years. Mr. France is still
robust, hale and hearty, except his eyesight is somewhat bedimmed. He
would easily pass anywhere among strangers for a man of not more than
seventy-five years.
JAMES A. SHAMP.
It is by no means an easy task to describe the character of a man who
has led an eminently active and useful life and stamped the impress of his
individuality upon the plane of definite accomplishment. In an age bristling
with activity it is the man of deeds who is at the front in every line of en-
terprise and there can be no impropriety in justly scanning the acts of such
a man as they affect his public, social and business relations. Among the
representative men who have added to the various interests of Wooster and
given the city wide publicity as an important business center the gentleman
whose name introduces this sketch is entitled to specific and honorable notice.
For many years identified with the public and political life of Wayne county
and filling with marked ability positions of honor and trust, he has gained
the confidence of his fellow men, irrespective of party affiliation, and stands
above reproach in all that constitutes upright manhood and intelligent, enter-
prising and progressive citizenship.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
James A. Shamp is a native of Wayne county, Ohio, and was born
March 7, 1859. in Wooster township, of which his father, James M. Shamp,
late of Wooster, was for many years a prominent and influential citizen.
His mother, Mary C. Shamp, who is still living in Wooster, is a daughter
of Christian Silver, who moved from Virginia to Ohio in the pioneer period
and settled in Plain township, Wayne county, where he developed a good
farm and in due time became one of the leading men of his community.
James M. Shamp. a well-known architect, contractor and builder, as well as
a public spirited man, departed this life in Wooster in the year 1885.
The early years of James A. Shamp were similar in most respects to
those of the majority of lads blessed with wise and considerate parents
and excellent home training. At the proper age he entered the public schools
where he made commendable progress and where he continued his studies
until graduating from the high school at Wooster, with the class of 1879.
Having selected law as the profession best suited to his taste and inclination,
he began the study of the same the year of his graduation, in the office of
D. W. Kimber, then mayor of Wooster, under whose able instruction he
continued for a period of sixteen months, but the death of his father inter-
vening, he was not admitted to the bar, although amply qualified to pass
with ease the examination required. Being the oldest son and his mother
in delicate health, with several younger children to be supported, he cheer-
fully relinquished his cherished ambition of professional distinction and,
assuming the responsibilities devolving upon him, addressed himself to the
duty of the family’s maintenance. Possessing a naturally strong and inquir-
ing mind, which had been greatly strengthened and disciplined by studious
habits while a student. Mr. Shamp while still young qualified himself for
teaching, to which line of work he devoted his attention for a period of seven
years, during which time he achieved an enviable reputation as a capable
and popular teacher and rose to a conspicuous place among the successful
educators of Wayne county. In the spring of 1890 he discontinued this work
to become first assistant to Samuel Metzler, who was appointed that year
postmaster of Wooster, and during the next four years filled the position
in an eminently able and meritorious manner, proving capable in the dis-
charge of his duties, judicious in his relations with the public and in all
that he did justifying the wisdom of his selection. At the expiration of Mr.
Metzler’s term, Mr. Shamp continued four months with that gentleman’s
successor and later, in connection with R. T. Bechtel, now of the Wooster
postoffice, embarked in the telephone business, then in its infancy. Through
the persevering efforts of these two energetic and wide-awake men, the first
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Independent exchange in Ohio was established, but after conducting the enter-
prise jointly for some time it finally passed to the Millersville, Wooster &
Orrville Company, by which it has since been operated.
In April, 1898, when T. L. Flattery, of the Wooster postoffice, entered
upon the duties of the position he very prudently summoned Mr. Shamp
to his service as assistant postmaster, in which capacity he has since been
employed and in which he has added continuously to his already well-estab-
lished reputation as an able and faithful public servant.
Mr. Shamp has ever manifested a lively interest in public matters and
since attaining his majority has been an influential factor in local politics,
being recognized as one of the Republican leaders of Wayne county whose
efficient services have been fully appreciated by the party and whose judi-
cious counsel and well-grounded opinions carry weight and command respect.
In 1905 he was nominated for the office of probate judge, but by reason pf
the formidable strength of the opposition failed of election, although mak-
ing an exceptionally strong canvass and running ahead of the state Democratic
ticket in the county. From time to time he has been called to various
positions of trust, having served for several years as president of the board
of examiners of the city of Wooster, which post he continues to hold, and
at this time he is secretary of the public library board, besides assisting
to the extent of his ability all enterprises and measures having for their object
the material progress of the community and the social, intellectual and moral
advancement of the populace.
Mr. Shamp is a believer in the efficacy of secret fraternal work and as
an active member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, holding his
membership with Wooster Lodge, No. 42, has made his influence felt in dis-
seminating the principles of the order and demonstrating its practical worth
in educating and improving the condition of his fellow men. He was a
leading spirit in the movement which led to the erection of the present hand-
some grand lodge buildings in Springfield, and at different times has been
chosen to represent the lodge to which he belongs in the sessions of that
honorable body. At the present time he is secretary of the board of trus-
tees of Lodge No. 42, which office he has held for nine consecutive years,
and in addition thereto has passed all the chairs and been honored with every
position within the power of his fellow members to bestow.
On December 27, 1894, Mr. Shamp was united in marriage with Amanda
Mock, of Wayne county, the marriage being blessed with three children who
answer to the names of James D., Mildred M. and Miles A., all interesting
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and intelligent and pursuing their studies in the public schools of the city.
Mrs. Shamp was born in Stark county, this state, and is a daughter of Wil-
son and Emma Mock, who are among the well-known and highly esteemed
people of the community in which they reside. In his religious views Mr.
Shamp holds to the Methodist creed and with his wife belongs to the church
in Wooster, being a member of the official board of the organization.
“In a very full and reasonable sense, Mr. Shamp may be termed a self-
made man, all of his accomplishments originating in and directly flowing
from himself." “Xo adventitious aids contributed to his unfolding develop-
ment”; in every relation of life he has depended upon his own exertions and
the honorable place to which he has attained and the esteem in which he is
held by his fellow men indicate the high ideals which he has ever had in view
and the noble purposes by which he has always been actuated. 1 He shirks no
duty, his work will bear the closest inspection and scrutiny, his promptness has
become proverbial, his integrity a maxim and his judgment, always sound
and sure, together with his optimistic and generous nature, eminently fit him
to adorn any position within the gift of his fellow men.
CYRUS D. SMITH.
As a native son of Wayne county and a representative of one of the early
pioneer families in this section of the Buckeye state, Mr. Smith is eminently
entitled to representation in a compilation which has to do with those who
have been the founders and builders of this commonwealth, while such is his
personal honor and integrity of character and such his standing as one of the
successful and progressive men of the county that this consideration is all the
more compatible.
Cyrus D. Smith was born in Canaan township, Wayne county, on the
20th day of September, 1852. His antecedents were Scotch, from which
blood come many of the sturdy qualities which characterize him. His pa-
ternal grandfather. James Smith, was born about 1770 and followed the pur-
suit of agriculture during his active years. He came to Wayne county about
1820, his having been the fifth family to settle in Canaan township. Here
he entered land from the government, and among a number of interesting
and valuable old relics in the possession of the subject of this sketch, there
is the following tax receipt, thought to lie the oldest tax receipt in this countv:
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“Received of James Smith $1.80, taxes on 160 acres of land. September 14,
1821.” James Smith died about thirty years ago, never having removed from
the farm which he entered from the government. Among his children was
Adam Smith, father of the subject, who was a native of Pennsylvania, but
who was brought to Ohio with his parents when he was but an infant. Adam
Smith too followed farming during his life and died at the Canaan township
homestead about forty-two years ago, at the age of forty-six years. He
married Tabitha Barnes, who was a native of Canaan township, her family
having removed to this state in about 1830, coming from West Virginia.
Her death occurred about eleven years ago. By her union with Adam Smith,
she became the mother of the following children : Cyrus D., the immediate
subject of this sketch; James, of Silver City, Idaho; one that died in infancy
unnamed ; Ada, who died at the age of twelve years ; Mary, who died at ten
years of age; Andrew, who lives on the old home farm in Canaan township;
and Ella, who makes her home with her brother Andrew.
Cyrus D. Smith spent his boyhood days on the parental farmstead and
secured his education in the common schools of the township. At the age of
twenty-two years, he went into the sawmill and lumber business at Creston,
in which he was engaged about a year. Then going to Orrville, he went into
the same line of business, which he followed for thirteen years, meeting with
fair success the meanwhile. On the first day of January, 1893, he came to
Wooster and entered upon the discharge of his duties as sheriff of Wayne
county, to which position he had been elected in the autumn of the previous
year, as the nominee of the Democratic party. Mr. Smith served two years
in this position, giving the office his faithful and painstaking attention and re-
tiring from it with the commendation of all. After relinquishing his official
position, Mr. Smith engaged in the coal and transfer business in this city, in
which he has since been continuously occupied, meeting with splendid suc-
cess. While living at Orrville, he had given efficient service to his township
as trustee and also served as a member of the Orrville city council. In every
position in which he has been placed he has faithfully performed his part and
has won and retains the high regard of all who have known of him and his
work.
In 1874 Mr. Smith married Sarah E. Whonsetler, who was born and
reared in Canaan township, the daughter of Philip Whonsetler. To this
union five children have been born, as follows: Frank E., deceased: William
M., who is associated with his father in business under the firm style of C.
D. Smith Sc Son; Charles C., who is the proprietor of the London Tea House
and Grocerv at Wooster; Maud, who is the wife of Fred Shook, of Alliance,
this state; Edith, w^ho is the wife of Wallace H. Smith, of this city.
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Politically, Mr. Smith is a stanch and uncomprising adherent of the
Democratic party and gives it an active and influential support, being con-
sidered one of the wheelhorses of the party in this county. Fraternally, he is
a member of the Knights of Pythias, which order he joined in 1885 and in
which he has passed through all the chairs of the subordinate lodge. Mr. and
Mrs. Smith are well and favorably known and enjoy the warm regard of
many friends.
CONRAD RUMPLE BECKLEY.
No man in recent years has left more indelibly the imprint of his
sterling personality upon those with whom he came in contact in Wayne
county, Ohio, than the late Conrad Rumple Beckley, whose life record has
been closed by the fate that awaits all mankind. His influence still per-
vades the lives of those whom he knew, for his example both in a business
and social way is worthy of emulating, as will be seen by a careful perusal
of the following paragraphs. He was born about 1830 in Carroll county,
Ohio, and he came to Wayne county about 1867 and was engaged in the
dry goods business in Orrville for many years. For twelve or thirteen years
he was in partnership in the mercantile business with H. H. Strauss and they
succeeded in building up a large trade. He first worked as a clerk for a
Mr. Bartholomew. Then in 1868 he and Mr. Strauss bought the interest
of Mr. Bartholomew and conducted the business where Mr. Des Voignes is
now located. In time they dissolved partnership and Mr. Beckley engaged
in the grocery business for a few years. In 1884 he retired from business,
following the death of his son. which sad event affected him very deeply.
During the balance of his life — twenty-one years — he lived in retirement,
dying March 23, 1905, at the age of seventy-five years.
Mr. Beckley was a soldier in the Civil 'war. having been a member of
Company D, One Hundred and Sixty-second Regiment Ohio Volunteer In-
fantry, in which he served very faithfully for a period of two years. He
recruited volunteers for the Union army before joining its ranks himself.
When he enlisted he was living at Minerva, Stark county, Ohio.
Conrad R. Beckley was the son of John Beckley, a native of Pennsyl-
vania, who married a Miss Rumple. Conrad R. Beckley was married at
Minerva, Stark county, August 11. 1859, to Mary E. Graham, daughter of
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James and Elizabeth (Seaton) Graham, natives of Philadelphia, Pennsyl-
vania. Mrs. Beckley was born near Minerva, Ohio, where her parents owned
a large farm. Her father was also a miller, for many years occupying the
responsible position of head miller at Hardesty's mill at Malvern, Carroll
county. Mrs. Beckley’s mother died while the family lived on the farm near
Minerva, when the former was only two years old. To Mr. and Mrs.
James Graham eight children were born, only two of whom are living in 1909.
Mr. Beckley was married twice, first to Caroline Christener, by whom he be-
came the father of two children, Mary Elizabeth, widow of Ross Hall, who
lives in Toledo, Ohio, and Loren Edwin, who is living in San Bernardino,
California. Five children were born to Mr. Beckley and his second wife,
namely: Emma, who died at the age of twenty-two years; Ellsworth, who
died when twenty-one years old. was a very bright and promising youth,
and his death deeply grieved his father, with whom he was connected in
the grocery business; Ann F. is the wife of Charles F. Hawk, of Cleveland,
Ohio; Nora B. is the wife of Charles A. Wolfe, of Washington, D. C. ;
Willard Karl lives in Akron, Ohio, where he has charge of the gents' fur-
nishing department of O’Neill’s store.
Mr. Beckley was a Republican in politics, and in his church relations he
was a Methodist, having taken a great interest in the affairs of the same,
and he very faithfully served on the official board from the time he came
to Orrville until his death. He was a very successful business man, courteous
to his customers, obliging and always strictly honest in his dealings with his
fellow-men. Although quiet and unobtrusive, he was a man of very pro-
nounced opinions and courageous in his views. Being a very religious man.
he was careful in rearing his children. He was generous and a good pro-
vider for his home, an indulgent father, a faithful husband and a most ex-
cellent neighbor, as well as a successful and prominent business man, his
loss to the town greatly influencing all circles. That his life was exemplary
is shown by the fact that he never used tobacco or liquors in any form, — in
fact, he was free from the common vices that beset the pathways of men, and
the young man standing at the parting of the ways whose fortunes are mat-
ters for the future to determine could do no better than take his life as a
model in both a business and social way.
Mrs. Beckley is an ardent advocate of temperance, as are also her
children. She has been a member of the Methodist church since a little girl,
very active in the work of the same, and she is held in high esteem by the
local congregation and, in fact, all who know her. Her life has been one
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of mingled joy and sorrow, but happy and satisfactory in the main. Having
been left without a mother's care when two years old, she was taken when
five years of age by Dr. Levi Haldenman. of Minerva, by whom she was
reared. She is a woman of gracious, generous, pleasant demeanor and loved
by a host of warm personal friends. Her cozy home is on East Market
street.
CHARLES KRICK.
The life of this well known citizen shows what industry, good habits and
stanch citizenship will accomplish in the battle of acquiring property and mak-
ing himself generally useful in his community. A worthy descendant of an
excellent ancestry, Charles Krick has established a reputation for honesty
and fair dealing in Union township, Wayne county, where he was born
March 15, 1873, the son of Jacob and Elizabeth (Worth) Krick, a detailed
account of whose lives will be found on another page of this work under the
sketch of Jacob Krick.
Charles Krick was the next to the youngest child of a family of eight
children, four boys and four girls. He was reared on the old Krick farm
in East Union township and here received a good common school education,
working on the farm during the summer months.
When he reached maturity he began casting about for a life work and
decided that the free life of the farmer was the most independent and at-
tractive; consequently, being a hard worker and a good manager, he now has
a good start, being the owner of fifty-three acres of excellent land known as
the Jacob Swinehart farm, located in section 9, East Union township, where
he carries on general farming and stock raising and enjoys a comfortable in-
come. His place is in an excellent state of improvement in every respect.
Mr. Krick was married on March n, 1903, to Daisy Waiters, daughter
of J. W. Warters, of Apple Creek, this township. She was born in Wooster
township and reared on the home farm, receiving a common school education
in her native vicinity. She applied herself well and became enabled to teach
school, which she did very acceptably for some time. She also attended
school at Apple Creek and later took a normal course. To Mr. and Mrs.
Krick three children have been born, namely, Mabel and Mildred, twins, born
January 14, 1905; Ruth, born January 4, 1907.
Mr. Krick is a member of the Presbyterian church at Apple Creek, this
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township, and politically he is a Democrat, and has taken some interest in
local party affairs, having served as a member of the county central commit-
tee and also as an election judge. He is a young man of thrift and he and
his wife enjoy the friendship and good will of all their neighbors.
SAMUEL S. AMES.
The gentleman to a brief review of whose life and characteristics the
reader’s attention is herewith directed is among the foremost business men
of Wooster and has by his enterprise and progressive methods contributed in
a material way to the industrial and commercial advancement of the city and
county. He has in the course of an honorable career been most successful
in the business to which he has directed his attention, and he is well deserving
of mention in the history of Wayne county.
Samuel S. Ames was born in East Lmion township, Wayne county,
Ohio, about six miles east of Wooster, on the 6th day of November, 1842.
He is descended from sturdy Pennsylvania-Dutch stock, and his paternal
grandfather, John Ames, was a native of the Keystone state, born in Lan-
caster county. The subject’s father, John Ames, was also born in Lancaster
county, Pennsylvania, and came to Ohio in about 1821, settling on a farm in
East Union township, Wayne county. There he bought land, which he im-
proved and maintained at a high standard of excellence, and on this place he
spent his remaining days, his death occurring in 1857. He married
Sarah Stauffer, also a native of Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, and
whose death occurred in 1884. To John and Sarah Ames were born children
as follows: Nathaniel, deceased: Susan, deceased; Davis, who is living at
Girard, Illinois; Lydia, the wife of Stephen Elly, of Lucas county, Ohio; the
subject of this sketch is the next in order of birth; Eli, of Elkhart county,
Indiana.
Samuel S. Ames remained with his parents until he was fifteen years of
age and in the meantime secured what education he could in the country
schools of his native township. He was reared to the work of the farm, but,
believing he could make greater advancement in other lines of employment,
he went to work at the carpenter’s trade, with the intention of mastering the
details of that trade. In 1866 he came to Wooser and worked at the trade
until 1872. when he commenced contracting on his own account. He has
been continuously engaged in this line of business since, a period of nearly
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forty years, and during this time he has erected many of the best business
houses and residences in this city and county. He is painstaking and accurate
in his work and anything entrusted to him may be depended on as being done
right. He employs at times a large force of men and has successfully handled
a number of large contracts.
In 1870 Mr. Ames was united in marriage to Martha W. Watson, the
daughter of Donald and Christiana (McPherson) Watson, the former of
whom was born in Scotland in 1800. To Mr. and Mrs. Ames have been born
two children, namely, John W. and Chalmer, the last named being deceased.
Mr. Ames has taken a commendable interest in local public affairs and
has served efficiently as a member of the city council of Wooster, rendering
definite and satisfactory service to his constituents. In politics he is a Repub-
lican and is active in support of the party. In matters fraternal he is also inter-
ested, being a member of the time-honored order of Free and Accepted
Masons, in which he has taken the degrees up to and including that of Knight
Templar; he has also been a member of the Knights of Honor since 1875.
In every avenue of life’s activities in which he has engaged, Mr. Ames has
performed well his part and has richly earned the high esteem which is ac-
corded him in the community where he has so long resided.
ROBERT J. SMITH.
A most exemplary citizen and an honored hero of the war of the Rebel-
lion is Robert J. Smith, who conducts a successful coal and transfer business
in the city of Wooster, Ohio. During his army career he was ever found
faithful to the duties imposed upon him, thus winning the confidence and
high regard of his comrades and superior officers, while in his business life
and social relations he has ever manifested the same justice, integrity and
reliability, because of which he has won and retains the high regard of all
who know him.
R. J. Smith is a native son of the Keystone state and is of Irish ante-
cedents. His birth occurred in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, on the
16th of August, 1847, ancI he is the son of John M. Smith, also a native of
the same county. In his native county, the father lived his entire life, fol-
lowing the honorable pursuit of a tiller of the soil, and there he died in 1901,
in his eightieth year. He married Xancy Matthews, also a native of West-
moreland county, and her death, in her eightieth year, occurred two vears
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before that of her husband. They were the parents of the following children :
Hiram M., who lives in the state of Colorado; Robert J., subject of this
sketch; William M.. who resides in Kansas; Jennie (Mrs. Johnson), residing
at Greensburg, Pennsylvania; James H.. of Seattle, Washington; Edward J.,
who resides at the old family homestead at New Florence, Pennsylvania;
Sarah Agnes, also residing at New Florence: Thomas Watson and Mary
Ellen are both deceased. The subject's paternal grandfather, Robert Smith,
came to America from Ireland in 1801. He had married before emigrating
and on arrival here he and his wife settled on land in Westmoreland county,
Pennsylvania, which he cultivated for many years, dying at a ripe old age.
Robert J. Smith remained on the home farm with his mother until he
was twenty-six years old. Then, feeling that larger opportunities for an
ambitious man lay farther to the west, he came to Wooster, Ohio, arriving
here in 1874. He here engaged in the milling business, in connection with
which he also dealt in ice, and these two industries he successfully carried on
until 1894. In that year he sustained a heavy loss in the destruction of his
mill by fire, but he at once went to work to recoup his finances and engaged
in the coal and ice business, which he continued until 1907, when he sold the
ice business, since which time he has confined his attention to the coal and
transfer business. He has been fairly successful in his business affairs and is
today considered one of the substantial business men of Wooster, where he
has been identified with business interests for so many years. During recent
years he has been assisted by his son Robert, who is an able and efficient busi-
ness man.
It would be unjust to complete this sketch without making specific men-
tion of the service which Mr. Smith rendered to his country in the hour of
its extremity. In February. 1864, he enlisted in the Fourth Regiment Penn-
sylvania Cavalry and thereafter took part in a number of severe engagements,
one of the most sanguinary of which was the battle of the Wilderness on
May 6, 1864. He was with General Grant in all his campaigns up to White
House Landing, and at the battle of St. Mary's church, June 26, 1864, he re-
ceived a severe gunshot wound in the left leg. From the effects of this wound
he was confined in hospital until August of the following year, when he was
discharged and returned to his home. Because of his military service, Mr.
Smith is now an honored member of the Grand Army of the Republic.
On the 28th of December, 1868, Mr. Smith was united in marriage to
Elizabeth H. Pollock, who was born and reared in Westmoreland county,
Pennsylvania. To this union were born three children, namely: Arnett Pol-
lock, who died at the age of two years ; Thomas Watson, who died at the age
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of seventeen years, and Robert H.. who is associated with his father in busi-
ness. He married Vina L. Mackey and they have two children, Elizabeth H.
and Lucy.
Mr. Smith is an ardent and enthusiastic supporter of the Republican
party and has taken a somewhat active part in public affairs. On that ticket
he was elected mayor of the city of Wooster, serving from 1898 to 1902,
and he was also trustee of Wooster township for fifteen years, being re-elected
continuously for eleven years. In religion, he belongs with his wife to the
United Presbyterian church and they are faithful attendants and generous
supporters of that society.
ROBERT S. APPLEMAN.
The life history of him whose name introduces this review is closely
identified with the commercial life of Wooster and Wayne county, of which
he is a native son. His business career was begun in this county, and during
the subsequent years he has been constantly allied with local interests. His
life has been one of untiring activity and has been crowned with a com-
mensurate degree of success. He is of the highest type of business man, and
none more than he deserves a fitting recognition among those whose enter-
prise and ability have enabled them to climb the ladder of success.
Robert S. Appleman was born at Maysville, Wayne county, Ohio, Sep-
tember 7, 1850, and he is the son of William and Sarah J. (Simpson) Apple-
man. The Appleman family is thought to be of German origin, though the
Ohio family of this name came directly from Pennsylvania. The subject’s
paternal grandfather, Permenas Appleman. was born in Wayne county, Ohio,
and his death occurred about twenty years ago, at which time he was seventy-
eighty years old. During his younger years he followed the pursuit of agri-
culture. but later for a number of years he ran a dry goods store at Fredericks-
burg. William Appleman, the subject’s father, was born in Wayne county,
near Maysville, and during his active years confined his attention to farming,
in which he was fairly successful. He spent all his life in Wayne and Holmes
counties. He was a strong Presbyterian in religious belief and an ardent and
active Republican in politics. During his younger days he taught school sev-
eral terms and was considered a good teacher. He passed away about four-
teen years ago at Shreve, where he had lived in retirement about eight years,
his age at death being about sixty-six years. He married Sarah J. Simpson,
who was born near Millersburg, Holmes county, Ohio. Her father, Robert
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Simpson, was a native of the north of Ireland and emigrated to America with
his parents when a young man, settling in Holmes county. Later he removed
to near Maysville, Wayne county, where he spent his remaining years. Sarah
J. Appleman died about ten years ago, at the age of seventy years. By her
union with William Appleman, she became the mother of the following chil-
dren: Robert S., the immediate subject of this review; John R., who died at
one year of age; W. S. is a farmer and lives near Shreve, Holmes county; S.
A. is engaged in the sewing machine business at Mansfield, Ohio.
The subject of this sketch remained during his boyhood years on the
home farm, securing a fair education in the common schools of his home com-
munity. At the age of eighteen years he began the study of music, for which
he had early exhibited a decided talent and to which he had given much at-
tention during the years prior. He engaged in the teaching of music, both
instrumental and vocal, and in this work he achieved a pronounced success,
following it exclusively for twelve years. He then went into the piano busi-
ness at Shreve, and later at Loudon ville, and in 1898 he came to Wooster and
opened a general music store, which he still conducts. He handles pianos,
organs, phonographs and other musical instruments, and in connection also
carries a large and carefully selected line of vocal and instrumental music.
The store, which is located on South Market street, is the headquarters for
music-loving people and Mr. Appleman has from the start enjoyed a liberal
patronage.
Mr. Appleman has twice been married. In 1873 he married Julia L.
Lind, of near Paint Valley, Holmes county, Ohio, and to this union were
born five children, namely: Edwin C., deceased; William H., of Seattle,
Washington; Louella, the wife of J. H. Van Horn, of near Loudonville,
Ohio ; C. Earl, who is associated with his father in the music business ; Jean-
ette, who died at the age of two and a half years. Mrs. Appleman died in
1887 at Loudonville and in 1889 Mr. Appleman married Annilda Fredrick, a
daughter of J. P. Fredrick, deceased, a former resident of Loudonville. To
this last union have been born four children, as follows: Martha, at home;
Fred, deceased; Ralph S. and Joseph A., both at home.
Fraternally Mr. Appleman belongs to the Free and Accepted Masons,
the Knights of Pythias and Order of American Yeomen, and in the Pythian
order he has passed the chairs. In politics he is a Prohibitionist. The sub-
ject and his wife are active members of the First Presbyterian church. He
has always taken an earnest interest in religious matters and while a resident
of Loudonville was for sixteen years an elder in the church, having also occu-
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pied other church offices there and at Shreve. In their home Mr. and Mrs.
Appleman practice a generous and kindly hospitality, finding greatest pleasure
in intercourse with congenial friends. They are highly respected because of
their sterling qualities of character and their friends are in number as their
acquaintances.
CHARLES WESLEY BOLEN.
This gentleman opened an office in Wooster in 1908 and was soon
recognized as an energetic and far-sighted business man. He devotes his at-
tention to western investments, his long experience in mining enterprises hav-
ing given him a knowledge of mines and mining attained by few.
Mr. Bolen was born in Union City, Indiana, October 21, 1868, and is
the son of John Wesley and Mary (Straider) Bolen, an old and influential
family of that place. He received his education in the common schools
of Union City, also spent a short time at Ada University. He was only a
small hoy when his mother died and he became self-supporting early in life,
earning his first money shining shoes. He later worked in a brick-yard, saw-
mill and as a section hand on the railroad. While attending school he drove
a delivery wagon for a grocery store mornings and evenings and on Satur-
days. Being ambitious to obtain an education, he let nothing stand in his
wav, and his efforts were crowned with large success in due course of time.
He taught one term of school and later clerked in a grocery store, and
while thus engaged began reading law in the office of ex-Gov. Isaac P. Gray,
and later with Theodore Shocknev. He was admitted to the bar and for six
years devoted his attention to his profession, which extended over four coun-
ties in Indiana and Ohio, during which time he won an enviable reputation
as an earnest, able and painstaking lawyer. His friend. Governor Gray,
being appointed minister to Mexico by President Cleveland, interested Mr.
Bolen in mining in Mexico, and for a period of five years he operated in
the copper mines of Mexico and Arizona. He was very successful in making
investments in mining properties and for several years maintained an office
in Columbus. Ohio, also one in Denver, Colorado, later adding the Wooster
office, and his name has become familiar to the mining world during the
past few years. He is a principal stockholder of the Stoughton Mining and
Milling Company, also a stockholder in the North Star Mining, Milling and
Transportation Company, the Colusa Mining and Milling Company, the Ohio
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Quartz Hill Mining Company, all in Colorado; and the Golden Chief Mining
Company, of Rhyolite, Nevada. All of these are being operated, Mr. Bolen
owning five hundred thousand shares in them.
The domestic life of Mr. Bolen began in 1892, when he married Jessie
H. Starbuck, a lady of culture and refinement and the representative of an
honored and influential family. This union has been graced by the birth of
two children, Edward and Uda.
Politically, Mr. Bolen is a Democrat, and fraternally he belongs to the
Knights of Pythias and the Improved Order of Red Men.
Mr. Bolen is a splendid specimen of well-rounded, symmetrically devol-
oped, virile manhood, with a commanding presence and a strong personality,
being six feet in height, having a keen eye and a dignity of bearing, moving
among his fellows as one born to leadership. He is companionable, genial, a
hale and hearty spirit, whose presence inspires good humor. With duties
that would crush the ordinary man, he has his labors so systematized that
he experiences little or no inconvenience in doing them. He is a vigorous
as well as an independent thinker, a wide reader, and he has the courage of
his convictions upon all subjects which he investigates. His career as an
attorney and in business has been strikingly original and fearless, prosecuting
his researches after his own peculiar fashion, and, measured by the accepted
standard of excellence, his career, though strenuous, has been eminently hon-
orable and useful, and his life fraught with good to his fellows and to the
world.
O. C. WILLIAMS.
O. C. Williams, who is engaged in the livery business in Wooster, ranks
among the more enterprising and progressive business men. The prosperity
of any community, town or city depends in a large measure on its commercial
activity, its industrial interests and its trade relations, and therefore the real
upbuilders of a town are those who stand at the head of the leading enter-
prises. Mr. Williams has, by his progressive methods and enterprising spirit,
been a definite factor in the advancement of Wooster's business interests.
The subject was born in Holmes county, Ohio, on the 19th of January,
1861. His father, Stephen R. Williams, was a native of Pennsylvania, born
February 17, 1817, but has lived in Holmes county since he was two years
old, and, what is more notable, has lived all these years on the same farm.
His antecedents were Welsh. On April 30, 1830, Mr. Williams married
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Jane Hague, who was born in this country, March 5, 1822, but whose parents
were born at The Hague. Holland. Stephen R. Williams owns a splendid
farm of two hundred and fifty acres and, despite his advanced age, he still
maintains an active supervision over its operation, being still in vigorous
health and as strong mentally as when in his physical prime. On April 30,
1910, he and his wife celebrated their seventieth wedding anniversary. To
their union were born the following children : Rev. Albert B., of Mount Ver-
non, Ohio; Nancy, the widow of Lewis Everhard, deceased; Mary, the wife
of George W. Burkett, of Lincoln, Nebraska; Ruth, the wife of Rev. J. T.
H. Stewart, of Welcome, Ohio; W. V., of Winfield, Kansas, where he was in
the hardware business for twenty-two years, but is now in the real estate busi-
ness; and O. C., the subject of this sketch. Three sons, James, Aaron and
John, are deceased.
O. C. Williams was reared on the parental farmstead in Holmes county
and remained there until 1884. In that year he went to Harper county, Kan-
sas. and engaged in the general merchandise business, in which he continued
for twelve years, meeting with fair success. He then returned to his native
state and went to farming in Holmes county, in which he was occupied for
about ten years. On May 1, 1905, he came to Wooster and took charge of
his present business, that of liveryman, in which he has been very successful.
The barn was established in 1887 by his brother-in-law, Lewis Everhard, now
deceased, and is a large and commodious structure, capable of accommodating
one hundred and fifty head without undue crowding. This barn bears the
distinction of being the first ten-cent bam in the state of Ohio and the second
in the LTnited States. It is run on practically the European plan, every
horse getting an enclosed stall. The barn is equipped with a ladies' waiting
room and toilet, as well as other conveniences, and from the start the insti-
tution has met with the approval of the public, it being accorded a liberal and
constant patronage, especially by the farmers, by whom it is duly appreciated.
O11 June 20, 1895, Hr. Williams was married to Mary Alice Wishard,
the daughter of John and Elizabeth Wishard, the family being of sturdy
Scotch ancestry on both paternal and maternal lines. Mary Wishard was
born in Danville. Hendricks county. Indiana, and received a good education in
the public schools of her native state, the high standard of which is a matter
of national reputation. To Mr. and Mrs. Williams have been born two
children, Horace Williams, born February 5. 1897, and Elizabeth Jane, born
October 15, 1908.
Fraternally, Mr. Williams is a Freemason, belonging to the lodge at
Millersburg. Ohio, W ith his wife, he is a member of the Christian church.
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to which they both give a loyal and generous support. In politics he is a
stanch supporter of the Republican party, though he has no inclination for
public office. Mr. Williams has many friends in Wooster, where his character
as an honorable and upright man is well known. He is pleasant and agree-
able in manner, and both he and his estimable wife delight to offer the
hospitality of their pleasant home to their many friends.
WILLIAM HERBERT BLISS.
The record of Mr. Bliss is that of a man who by his own unaided efforts
worked his way from a modest beginning to a position of definite standing
in the business circles of Wooster, where he is now engaged in the grocery
business. His life has been of unceasing industry and perseverance and the
systematic and honorable methods which he has followed have won for him
the unbounded confidence of his fellow citizens.
Mr. Bliss was bom at Bloom ville, Seneca county, Ohio, on the 16th of
March, 1869. His paternal grandfather, who was a native of New York
state, was a successful merchant there, and met his death by accidental drown-
ing after removing to Ohio. The subject's father, Edson P. Bliss, was also
born in the state of New York and was brought to Ohio when a baby, his
parents settling in Seneca county. After receiving his education and reaching
years of maturity, he engaged in the dry goods business, and was so engaged
for twenty-nine years. During the first years he was a business partner with
Henry M. Flagler, of Standard Oil fame. Mr. Bliss died in November,
1886. He married Elizabeth Killey, who was born in Maryland and who died
when the subject of this sketch was but four years old. To Mr. and Mrs.
Bliss the following children were born: Melvin O., of Bloomville, Ohio;
Malcolm E., also of Blooniville: Ginnela, who is the wife of Clinton C. Leyda,
ticket agent at Shreve, Ohio; the subject of this sketch is the youngest of the
family.
William H. Bliss spent his boyhood in Bloomville. and attended the pub-
lic schools, graduating in due time from the Bloomville high school. Desir-
ing to secure a more complete education he then entered Heidelberg Univer-
sity, at Tiffin, Ohio, where he remained two years, and then spent two years
in Wooster LTniversity. In 1888 Mr. Bliss located in Wooster and established
himself in the grocery business in 1895. From a modest beginning, his busi-
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ness has grown until it is now of large proportions and realizes to Mr. Bliss
a handsome annual net income. He carries a large and well-selected stock
of everything usually to be found in an up-to-date grocery and his efforts to
please his customers have been rewarded by constantly increasing business.
On the 6th of October, 1895, Mr. Bliss was united in marriage to Lillie
May Siegenthaler, daughter of Albert J. Siegenthaler, of Wooster, where she
was born and reared. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss are members of the Methodist
Episcopal church and are interested in advancing its work in the community.
In politics Mr. Bliss is a Republican, but takes no very active part in public
matters, preferring to give his undivided attention to his business interests.
He is Democratic in his tastes and has made many warm personal friends
since locating in Wooster, who esteem him because of his sterling qualities.
He is a self-made man and is eminently entitled to representation in a work
of this character. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss have a pleasant home at No. 55 East
La r will street.
WILLIAM L. LONG.
I11 the daily laborious struggle for an honorable competence and a solid
career on the part of a business or professional man there is little to attract
the reader in search of a sensational chapter; but to a mind thoroughly awake
to the reality and meaning of human existence there are noble and imperish-
able lessons in the career of an individual who, without other means than a
clear head, strong arm and true heart, directed and controlled by correct prin-
ciples and unerring judgment, conquers adversity and finally wins, not only
pecuniary independence, but, what is far better, the deserved respect and con-
fidence of those with whom his active years have been mainly spent. To this
latter class belongs the subject of this sketch, who is recognized as one of the
leading contractors and builders in Wayne county.
Mr. Long was born in Wooster on the 8th of October, 1871. His par-
ents are Jacob and Sarah ( Ketker) Long, the former of whom was born in
Paradise. Wayne county, Ohio, where he was reared to the life of a farmer
Subsequently he was employed as a stone mason, and later lived at Cleveland.
Ohio, in retirement, having removed to that city in 1905, his death having
occurred recently. His widow is now making her home with her son. Jacob
Long had lived in Wayne county all his life up to the time of his removal.
His family is of German extraction, his father, Barnhart Long, having been
a native of the Fatherland. He came from Germany in young manhood.
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settling first at Goshen, Indiana, but removing to Wayne county, Ohio, in an
early day. He was an expert gunsmith and a highly respected man. His
death occurred in 1901. The subject’s mother was born in Toronto, Canada,
but in young girlhood was brought to the United States by her parents, who
settled in Wayne county, where she lived all her life up to the time of her
removal to Cleveland. Jacob and Sarah Long were the parents of the fol-
lowing children, thirteen in number: Shannon, deceased; Dora, the wife of
Irwin Stevens, of Cleveland, Ohio; William L., subject of this sketch; Jen-
nie, the wife of Edward Gibbons, of Columbus, Ohio; Ethel, the wife of
Clem Langell, of Cleveland, Ohio; Alice, wife of Hugh McAnnaney, of Fort
Lupton, Colorado ; David, of Cleveland ; Earl, who died at the age of twenty-
five years; Goldie, the wife of Charles Smith, of Cleveland; Karl, of Cleve-
land; Frank, of Wooster; Hazel, wife of Charles Wheaton, of Columbus,
Ohio; Nellie, deceased.
Though the subject of this sketch was born in the city of Wooster, he
went to live with his father on a farm at ten years old, and worked there until
fourteen years old. His parents were poor, and his father was compelled to
support his large family by day labor. After the father rented the little farm
out from the city and moved there, things did not materially brighten, as the
land was poor and the combined efforts of father and boys could not make it
produce enough to keep the family in comfort. William became discouraged
at the outlook and told his father he was going to Wooster and hunt work,
that he might provide his mother with money, as she had not seen a ten-dollar
bill since they had moved to the farm. The boy soon found employment, and,
being possessed of a rugged constitution and a willing disposition, he was soon
enabled to command fair wages. He first learned the stone-mason’s trade and
then that of a brick mason, in both of which he became a proficient workman.
Bv thrift and economy he was enabled to save money and in 1891 he went into
the contracting business on his own account. In this line he has achieved a
success far beyond his early dreams and has built up a business second to none
in this section of the state. He has accumulated considerable material wealth,
being worth, at a conservative estimate, fifty thousand dollars, all of which
has been gained by hard work and the exercise of sound judgment. Mr.
Long constantly employs a large number of workmen and has performed some
of the largest building contracts ever let in this county. Among the buildings
constructed by him, the following may be mentioned : The Wayne county
jail, the university chapel, part of the Kauke hall, the Severance hall, the
university power house, the addition to the Frick Library at the university,
the Holden hall, these including the principal buildings at Wooster Univer-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
sity, the Wayne County Building and Loan Association building, the Gersten-
slager Buggy Company factory, Wooster high school building, J. M. Gitner's
garage, the Wooster brush company's new factor}*, and many other of the
best class of buildings in the community, besides a large number of the best
residences. Everything Mr. Long undertakes is done well and he has long
had an enviable reputation because of the quality of his work. His property
interests include a beautiful home, in which he takes a justifiable pride. He
also bought a fine piece of farming land, and his father and mother lived on
this place for a while, but subsequently moved to Cleveland, where so many
of their children were living. Mr. Long is also a stockholder in the Wayne
County National Bank and in the Gerstenslager Buggy Company, both of them
leading institutions of their kind in this city, and a splendid farm of one hun-
dred and forty acres located two and a half miles east of Wooster.
In 1894 Mr. Long was united in marriage to Elizabeth I. Whitcomb, a
daughter of David Whitcomb, and born in Havsville, Ashland county, this
state. To this union four children have been born, namely: Edna V., Hugh
J., Donald, and one that died in infancy unnamed. Their home, on Pitts-
burgh avenue, is a charming place, where all visitors meet with a hearty and
spontaneous welcome and where the latch-string ever hangs on the outside.
In his social relations, Mr. Long is a member of the Independent Order of
Odd Fellows and the Modern Woodmen of America. In politics he is a
stanch Republican and takes an active interest in the success of his party, but
though frequently importuned to accept nomination for public office, he has
steadfastly refused to do so, preferring to devote his attention to his business
interests and his family, to which he is devoted. However, he is giving
effective service as a member of the board of public safety. Nevertheless he
is essentially alert and public-spirited in his attitude and his interest in all
that conserves the public welfare is unabating. Because of his courteous
manners, genial disposition and genuine worth, he has won and retains a host
of warm personal friends. Since above was written Mr. Long’s father died.
His mother makes her home with her son.
ALBERT GERLACH.
Among the enterprising citizens of Wooster, Ohio, is Albert Gerlach,
who is engaged in the meat business, managing one of the oldest, best known
and extensive shops in the city, while he maintains a very comfortable home
here, and the years of his residence have but served to strengthen the feeling
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of his fellow citizens, for he has shown what rightly directed principles,
coupled with honesty and industry, can accomplish toward definite success.
As the name indicates, this family is of German origin. Frank C. Gerlach,
father of the gentleman whose name introduces this sketch, was a native of
the province of Prussia; when a young man he joined a large colony of Ger-
mans and they came to the United States, most of them locating in Ohio,
young Gerlach making his way to Wooster, where he decided to remain,
finding that Wayne county offered exceptional inducements for a man of his
temperament. He engaged in the meat business, thus founding the well
known establishment of which the subject is now the manager and owner.
He was a successful business man and built up a very lucrative trade here.
He took considerable interest in local politics and at one time served in a very
creditable manner as township trustee. He lived in Wooster continuously
until his death, in March, 1885. Frank Gerlach married Johanna Kaltwasser,
a native of Prussia who came to America when a young woman. She died
on December 27, 1909. She was a kindly, generous and honest lady whom
everybody respected. By her marriage with Frank Gerlach she became the
mother of four children, Albert, Will, Frank, Jr., and Julius.
Albert Gerlach was born in Wooster, Ohio, March 29, 1861, and he has
lived here all his life. He received a very practical education in the local
schools, and when a mere boy assisted his father in the meat business. He
very naturally decided to follow in the latter’s footsteps and follow the same
line of work for a livelihood ; this he has done in a manner that stamps him as
progressive, alert and honest in all his dealings with his fellow men, having
been taught by his honored parents the old-time adage that, “Honesty is the
best policy.” His father taught him the “ins and outs’’ of the meat business
and gave him a share in the shop, which he is still managing in the same
systematic and careful manner as always characterized the methods of the
elder Gerlach, having not only been able to retain the old trade but also a con-
stantly growing new list of good customers. By his thrift and able manage-
ment he has won large success, accumulating a substantial competency and
ranking with the progressive business men of Wooster.
Mr. Gerlach has never assumed the responsibilities of the married state.
Fraternally, he belongs to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and in
politics he is a Democrat, but not a partisan. His church membership is
with the English Lutherans, of which he is a liberal supporter and in which
congregation he is held in high favor.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
DANIEL S. STOUT.
Daniel S. Stout needs no introduction to the citizens of Wayne town-
ship, Wayne county, for his long and eminently useful life has been spent here,
with the exception of his service in the army, for he was one of the loyal sons
of the North who sacrificed so much for succeeding generations, undergoing
the trials and privations, to say nothing of the dangers to life and limb,
during the stormy days of the early sixties. To such as he all honor is due.
As indicated, Mr. Stout was born in Wayne township, this county, near
Madisonburg, August 2, 1839. He is the son of Daniel Stout, a native of
Berks county, Pennsylvania, who married Catherine Oberlin, a native of
Lancaster county, that state. He came as a single man to Wayne county,
Ohio, in 1825, with his parents. His father was Matthias Stout, who mar-
ried Susan Gable, a native of Pennsylvania. They came to Wayne county,
Ohio, and purchased a small place near Madisonburg, on which Mr. Stout
lived until his death, his widow surviving and dying in Illinois.
Daniel Stout, father of Daniel S., of this review, was educated in the
common schools. His father, Matthias, was a well-educated man and a
teacher of German for some time. Daniel learned the bricklayer’s trade,
which he followed for several years, devoting the latter part of his life
to farming. He first secured land in Mercer county, Ohio, and in 1854 or
1855 he bought seventy-four acres where the subject now resides in Wayne
township. There was an old log house on the place at that time, but he
improved the place. His first wife died in 1882 and he married a second
time, his last wife being Rebecca Aultman, a native of Orrville, Ohio.
Daniel Stout was the father of thirteen children by his first wife and
three by his second. Those living by his first wife are, Daniel S.. subject
of this sketch; Jacob O., of Lima, Ohio; Simeon, a bricklayer at Mechanics-
burg, this county; Susan E., living at home; Catherine, also at home; James
F., of St. Marys, Ohio; Anna B., living at home. The following are the
children by Daniel Stout’s second marriage: Cora, living at East Palestine,
Ohio; Isa. of Orrville, Ohio; the other child by this marriage is deceased.
Daniel Stout held the office of trustee of his township, also other offices within
the gift of the people. He was a Democrat and a member of the Lutheran
church. His death occurred on May 3, 1896.
Daniel S. Stout, of this review, received only a common school educa-
tion, and he lived at home until he was twenty-two years of age, when he
enlisted his services in defense of the flag during the Civil war, serving with
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593
credit for a period of four years. His enlistment occurred in October, 1861,
in Company B, McLaughlin’s Squadron, which was organized at Mansfield,
Ohio. The regiment was sent to the Big Sandy river in eastern Tennessee
and was in that valley for one year; thence they ascended the Ohio river
and returned to the Big Sandy river country ; spent two months in Covington,
Kentucky; then went to Knoxville, Tennessee, and were there when the place
was besieged by Longstreet. Mr. Stout then went home on thirty days’ fur-
lough, after which he returned to Lexington, Kentucky. In March, 1864,
he went across Tennessee to Georgia and took part in the Atlanta campaign
and was captured on July 31st, sent soon afterward to prison at Anderson-
ville, also sent to the Florence prison, and after five months he was paroled
and exchanged. Then he came home again on a thirty-day furlough, return-
ing to his command in North Carolina, remaining with the same until his
discharge in November, 1865, after which he came home. Three of his
brothers were also in the Union army, John, of the One Hundred and
Twentieth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, became a captain; Jacob, who
became a second lieutenant in the company with Daniel S., served three and
one-half years, and he, too, was taken prisoner; William was also in the
same company with the subject of this review and died in Mellon prison,
Georgia.
After his army career, Daniel S. Stout launched into the butter and egg
business at Mechancisburg, this county; but after spending two years there
he went to Jackson county, Missouri, where he remained for two and one-
half years, then returned to Ohio, locating in Creston, Wavne county, and
was engaged in the butter and egg business for two years. Since that time
he has been on the old homestead, where he is carrying on general farming
very successfully, having a nice home and a well-managed place. He has
been a trustee of Wayne township for two terms, also served as school di-
rector. He votes the Democratic ticket. The Stout family are supporters
of the Evangelical Lutheran church of Wayne township.
ELMER S. LANDES.
Men possessed of genius, of business capacity, force and intelligence need
no factitious introduction to the public attention. The positions of honor,
influence and power in commerce, in statesmanship, in fact in any field of pub-
lic activity, are not always occupied bv men of the greatest resources or the
<3«)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
highest character, intellect or ability. Men who possess the best and most
valuable attainments, and who are qualified for the highest service, pass quietly
along, almost unrecognized, unhonored and unsung. An accident frequently
thrusts elaborations and exalted position upon an individual, or the independ-
ence of accumulated wealth, although he may be too small to fill the measure of
his luck. He who makes himself strong, and a factor, — a living, acting, ac-
complishing entity in his community, — whether a young man or not, who
makes himself felt as a progressive personality by his tact, foresight, enter-
prise, energy and judgment, is a greater and more valuable citizen than he
who goes “whistling to the air" in perfumed hammocks, knitted and woven
by the deft spiders of circumstance.
The beginning is more than doing a thing in time. It orders a con-
tinuance. It implies action, choice, purpose, courage, self-reliance, progress.
Some lives are diligent but unproductive, because they swing down into the
easiest place and go around, but never up and forward. Others appropriate
all their strength in pretense in appearing, not being. We conjecture that
with Mr. Landes the only sane philosophy of life comes through action.
The subject of this sketch is a native of Wayne county, as indigenous
to the soil as its wild flowers or its forest trees, and was born in Madison-
burg, Wayne township, October 24, 1867. He is a son of Thomas Allen and
Martha Jane Landes, of Wayne township, both of whom were born the same
year, 1846, in this township; his mother was also born at Madisonburg,
where she has lived continuously since her birth, or for sixty-three years.
His parents were united in marriage in 1866, and to this wedded union four
children, three sons and one daughter, were born, all of whom, save the
daughter, are living. His ancestral stock, both on the paternal and maternal
line, is strongly interfused with the old territory blood, albeit on the latter or
on the. mother’s side there is a healthy interjection of the red blood of the
Celts, the irrepressible Mishenaw that lives immortally in song and eloquence,
and who has glorified many a battlefield from Drogheds to Boyne Water.
His father was an upright, industrious citizen, the owner of considerable
real estate which he cultivated, in connection with which he engaged in train-
ing, a quite profitable vocation, and such other work as came within the range
of his ability and equipment to perform, his sons materially assisting him in
his farm work and other fields of labor in which he may have been engaged.
But during these earlier years of strenuous exertion the parents did not
overlook or neglect the matter of education of their children, making certain
their attendance upon the country or the village school. After the career
with his father on the farm in trading, digging and drilling wells, etc., had
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ended at the age of nineteen, he entered the Smithville Normal School, of
Prof. P. A. Palmer, and here he studied for two years, making rapid prog-
ress in faithfulness and efficiency of work. With his elementary equipment
and receiving his certificate, he launched his little bark on the mixed waters
of pedagogy, conducting his first school, in Zinn district, Wayne township.
He subsequently pursued this as a vocation for a period of thirteen years,
four as superintendent at Madisonburg, etc., serving as instructor one year
in the preparatory department of the Wooster University, under Professor
Dickason, the last four of his thirteen years' experience in the schoolroom
being employed as superintendent of the Dalton school. During the period of
his highly successful service at Dalton, he was granted, in consideration of his
qualifications and merit, an eight-year certificate by the county examining
board, the first one covering that period of years ever issued to an applicant.
He took the initiative, as the first of the younger teachers of Wayne county,
to incorporate into or communicate to his system of instruction and
plan of studies the normal aspect or the features of the normal, thereby aim-
ing to qualify and fortify such of the scholars as were desirous and ambi-
tious of becoming teachers for the scrutiny and inquisitive ordeal of examina
tion, supplementing this course of study with suggestive thoughts and proc-
esses of best method of school government. That this idea, in greater part,
original with Mr. Landes, was an inspiring success and operated to the best
advantage of all, requiring no other or more precise demonstration than in
the fact that, at the termination of his first year at Dalton, of an attendance
of but little in excess of fifty pupils, twenty of them obtained certificates as
teachers and entered the pedagogical field. We know of no better commen-
tary, no higher or more significant words of commendation that could be
pronounced to accent and emphasize these practical and vital, but unadver-
tised and unheralded, achievements of the school room.
Abandoning the phalanx of the teachers, he removed and settled in
Wooster, in August, 1907, and at once embarked in the realty agency busi-
ness to which he has since exclusively devoted his time and attention. He
found soon after he had opened office in the city that this department of busi-
ness was measurably in an inanimate, stagnate condition, or in other words,
was not being vigorously pushed along the lines especially as he conceived
were the proper ones along which to prosecute it, having in view, as a matter
of course, the compensations that might accrue to him personally, and that
wider and broader consideration as to how Wooster might be benefited, how
far its sleepy energies might be animated, how a spirit of investment of pur-
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chase and sale might be stimulated, how far an impulse toward the growth
and development of the city of Wooster could be encouraged and verified,
through an aggressive and vigorous ‘‘agency" such as he but recently estab-
lished.
We do not hesitate to say that the experiment he instituted has proven
a success so far as Mr. Landes is concerned, and equally so as to the measure
of stimulas of life it has imparted to healthier action in real estate, a better
understanding and definition of values, and a more determined and decisive
ambition on the part of business men of Wooster and the citizens in general,
to stand by Mr. Landes and stand by each other in the laudable and praise-
worthy ambition and purpose of purchasing property, erecting new buildings
conforming to the laws of permanence, taste and beauty and exerting them-
selves to the very utmost toward the growth, development and expansion of
the beautiful city of Wooster, making it not only a city of attractive homes,
but a city of business, a mart of trade, factories, mills, the theater of manu-
facturers, with both hands outstretched toward capital, enterprise and genius,
beckoning them to come, join us, keep us, in the great scheme of development.
Mr. Landes has performed a worthy and commendable part in this direc-
tion. He was one and the foremost in organizing the “Boosters’ Club,’’ now
merged in the Board of Trade, of which he is an active member, and perhaps
he and Mr. John Schultz accomplished more than came from any other source,
in formulating the plans and methods of procedure that secured the location
in our midst of the Gerstenslager carriage works. So consummate was the
organization of this club that in the days of the canvass for the amount stipu-
lated as the consideration for the transfer of the carriage works to Wooster,
one thousand two hundred dollars more than the sum required was subscribed
by the business men and other enterprising citizens of that city. As a con-
sequence of the enlargement of his business operations, which have contrib-
uted so directly and substantially to the growth and improvement of our city,
inspiring new enterprises and giving fresh momentum to those already con-
templated, or in process of .development, his brother Clarence came to Woos-
ter within the past two years, forming a partnership with him, his business
having assumed such proportions that assistance on his part became necessary.
Clarence Landes is an elder brother of the subject of this sketch, a native
of W ayne county, educated in W ayne county and a former teacher in the
schools of Wayne county, with an experience in this vocation of eight years,
and a business man in Wayne county for a number of years prior to his com-
ing to Wooster. He had for four years been engaged in the hardware trade
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in the flourishing village of Dovlestown, where he had built up a fine business,
the reputation of a gentleman of integrity, honesty, straightforward, upright
life, possessing excellent qualities as a man of business, characterized by the
individuality, self-reliance, quiet assertiveness, enterprise, judgment and alert
executive tact of his brother. He is a man of family, has come to Wooster
to stay, make it his home and help make it one of the hustling, progressive
and most beautiful inland cities of northern Ohio.
During the last few years Mr. Landes has also written and published two
most valuable books accordant to and in the manner of the “Our Educational
Service/1’ the first issued in 1901, entitled “Outlines in United States History,”
the second under the caption of “The New Practical Orthography,” in a total
of one hundred and ninety-four pages. The first volume embraces a succinct
history of political parties, from the time of the Whig and Tory organiza-
tions, the Federal, and Anti-Federal, Democratic, Anti-Masonic, Free Soil,
Barnburners. Hawkeyes, Republicans, etc. ; with a chronological record of our
territorial acquisitions from the Revolutionary period to Hawaii and our
armed contention with Spain, within the last decade. It is a work that can-
not fail to be a most valuable and helpful assistant to student and teacher,
and, as the author aptly says in the preface, its object being “to introduce
plans by which the acquisition of a thorough knowledge of the history of our
country may not only be an interesting but a pleasant task.”
“The New Practical Orthography” is a text book for use in public
schools, grammar schools and lower grades in high school, the later editions
of these works being issued from the press of the New Publishing Company,
of F. A. Owen. Dansville. New York. This little volume supplies a very evi-
dent demand in that, as the author most pertinently says, “it furnishes a prac-
tical treatise on orthography, sufficiently elementary for the country schools,
the grammar school and the lower grades in the high school, and at the same
time comprehensive enough to give a fair knowledge of the principles of
orthography/'
Mr. Landes is a Republican of the pronounced type, who emphasizes his
patriotism, party fealty and genuine Americanism on all proper occasions,
never obtrusive, however, in promulgation of his political opinions or predi-
lections. believing that in a free country, such as this, each man has a right
to his own views and may act in pursuance thereto in affairs political, moral
and religious and all matters of government. He is now serving his second
term as chairman of the Wayne county Republican executive committee and
assisted materially in shaping and directing the congressional campaign of
the late Hon. M. L. Smyser in 1907. Although he is a vigilant and active
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member of his party, he is not an office seeker — in fact, is without aspirations
in that direction, the exception to this being in 1905, when his party nomi-
nated him for county auditor, in which contest he was far-away and ahead of
his ticket, but went down in the “Herrick landslide” of that year.
. Mr. Landes has only fairly attained the midway division of the average
acting working life with the reasonable assurance and promise before him of
more working, compensating tomorrows than tested and exhausted yester-
days. He is largely a self-made man. believes in work, education and atten-
tion to business in hand, the mutual responsibility and interdependence of
man and their responsibility to state, and this is manifest in his spirit of prog-
ress and enterprise. He believes that whatever be your choice in life’s great
work, you must grasp this truth. You are a product and investment your-
self, if you will, of the state and to it you owe some returns. Every taxpayer
has contributed to your present advancement. The nation has found out that
ignorance is a menace, and that its safety and protection is in the trained and
educated minds of its citizens, through the village schools, the normals, acad-
emies and colleges. It is true that freedom has its obligations and liberty its
restrictions and no man, a product of our American institutions, has any
moral right to engage in anything that could not help another while at the
same time it affords him a livelihood and the means of increasing his fortune.
His experiences and labor as a teacher were adjusted along these parallels of
mental usefulness, and so are his exertions in the realty business at this time,
in his several allotments of property, of building sites and at present with
more than forty lots for sale of his own and the prospects of a dozen houses
being built in the immediate future. The secret of the success of Mr. Landes
is imbedded in a fixed purpose that differentiates from choice or desire, in
that it is as constant as the needle to the pole and as certain. He recognizes
the unchangeable equation : Attention plus service and sacrifice equals suc-
cess. Like the lens, it concentrates the rays of mental powers upon the
point to be attained and then Wanamaker, the clerk, becomes the merchant
prince, and Edison, the newsboy, the wizard of the world.
Mr. Landes is of medium height, dark hair and eves, firmly and compactly
built, and sound as the pillars in the Sistine chapel. Lie is sociable, agreeable
and companionable, guards well his thoughts and words, his ears a sanctuary
from the name of his absent and a locked secret of his present friend. Neither
of these can miscarry in his trust. He undertakes without rashness and per-
forms with fixed resolution, well-balanced and floats steadily. He is generous
and liberal. His business career is forward, yet he has the silent nerve to con-
front opposition or failure and would see under the frown of defeat the smile
of victonr. — By Ben Douglas.
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JOHN HOWARD BEECHER DANFORD.
Success has been worthily attained by J. H. B. Danford, who is today
accounted one of the prosperous business men and substantial citizens of Woos-
ter, Wayne county, Ohio. To his energy, enterprise, careful management
and keen discernment his present station in life is attributed. He started
upon his career as an independent factor at the bottom of the ladder and is
now the proprietor of one of the best business concerns in the city, occupying
a conspicuous place in the front rank of her successful citizens.
Mr. Danford was born in Guernsey county, Ohio, on July 4, 1867, there-
fore he celebrated his natal day on the anniversary of our national independ-
ence. His parents were Samuel M. and Rebecca (Finley) Danford. The
former, who was born in Noble county, Ohio, was a farmer by profession and
shortly after the close of the Civil war he removed to Guernsey county, where
he continued his farming operations. He was also for a while engaged in
mercantile pursuits, but subsequently relinquished that and returned to the
farm. During the great gold excitement of 1849 he caught the fever and
went to the Pacific coast, spending eight years in Oregon and California.
His death occurred when he was seventy-seven years old. He had a brother
in the Union army who at the battle of Gettysburg was wounded twenty-
seven times. Rebecca Finley Danford was born in Guernsey county, this
state, and her death occurred in 1879. Her mother’s family name was Morris
and she was related in direct line to Robert Morris, one of the immortal sign-
ers of the Declaration of Independence. To Samuel and Rebecca Danford
the following children were born: Angeline, deceased; Estella, deceased;
Viola is the wife of Elmer Secrest. of Chaseville, Noble county, Ohio; Eliza
is the wife of Noah Davis, also of Chaseville: Charles F., of Cambridge,
Ohio; J. H. B. is the immediate subject of this sketch; Cora, the wife of Ray
Larrick, of Pleasant City, Ohio; Anna L., the wife of C. L. Starr, of Pleasant
City, Ohio.
J. H. B. Danford was reared on the home farm and secured a fair edu-
cation in the common schools of his home township. When old enough he
assumed his share of the labors of the farm and continued to make his home
with his parents until 1890. He was then variously employed until about
1893, when he engaged in the furniture business at Pleasant City, where he
continued with fair success until 1904. In that year, desiring a wider scope
for business, he came to Wooster, and on March 8, 1905, be bought a half
interest with H. B. Christine, furniture dealer, and in December of the same
year he bought his partner’s interest, since which time he has been sole pro-
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prietor. The business has steadily grown and is now the largest furniture
store in Wooster. Mr. Dan ford occupies three floors and a basement, each
thirty-two by one hundred and seventy -five feet in size, and the stock carried is
in every respect up to date, being carefully selected and well displayed. In con-
nection with the general line of furniture and household furnishings, Mr.
Dan ford also carries on an undertaking business. In this line also he is very
successful, being himself a licensed embalmer. He is accommodating and
painstaking and is one of the most popular funeral directors in the county.
On November 14. 1895, Mr. Dan ford married Florence Blake, who was
born at Stockport, Morgan county, Ohio. She is of distinguished lineage,
tracing her paternal ancestry to Commodore Blake, the noted English naval
commander, and on the maternal side she is related to Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Mr. Danford is a director in the Pleasant City Telephone Company, of
Pleasant City, Ohio. Socially he is a member of the Free and Accepted
Masons, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Knights of Pythias.
In religion, he and his wife are active members of the Methodist Episcopal
church, of which Mr. Danford is one of the trustees. He is a Republican in
politics, though not in any sense an officeseeker, and he ever manifests a pub-
lic-spirited interest in local affairs, giving his aid and influence for the further-
ance of all measures for the general good. Because of his high personal
character Mr. Danford enjoys the confidence and esteem of all who know him.
JOHN N. BOOR.
The founder of this family was Michael Boor, who came from Ger-
many abort the middle of the last century and located in Cumberland county,
Pennsylvania, about 1754. He was one of the pioneer farmers of that region
and died there while the state was still an English colony. He left a son
named Nicholas, born January 27, 1792, who went to Frederick county. Vir-
ginia, in middle life and spent seven years in that part of the country. In
1854 he came to Wayne county, Ohio, where he farmed until his death,
in 1874. While in Pennsylvania he followed the business of teamster and
freighter. He married Catherine Boyer, who was born February 2, 1793.
and died July 2. 1855. The children by this union were: William. Maria,
Elizabeth (deceased), Catherine (deceased). Polly, Susan. Susanna: Adam
and Jacob are deceased; Mary is still living; David and Louisa are deceased;
George, who lives in Medina county, Ohio, served three vears in the Civil
war in Company C. Sixteenth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry.
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John N. Boor, the twelfth child of this large family, was born in Cum-
berland county, Pennsylvania, July 18, 1834. He remained under the pa-
rental roof until twenty-two years old, and then took charge of a threshing
machine, which he conducted for nine years, two of these on his own account,
and was very successful in this line of work. He served as constable from
1859 to i860 in this and in 1862 in Canaan township, but resigned. He was
captain of a militia company.
Mr. Boor’s war record is one of which his descendants may well be
proud and it forms one of the principal chapters in his life history, for he
was one of the patriotic sons of the North who left the pleasures and oppor-
tunities of home and business to render service for the Union. On April 23,
1861, in response to President Lincoln's first call for volunteers, he enlisted
in Company C, Sixteenth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and served
four months. In January, 1864, he re-enlisted in Company D, Ninth Ohio
Volunteer Cavalry, of which William D. Hamilton was colonel, and so inter-
esting and praiseworthy was the record of this regiment that a detailed ac-
count of its operations is deemed advisable here, for it was noted for its con-
tinued action and dash and fight. It was first organized in Camp Zanes-
ville in 1862, and was then but one battalion, four companies, commanded
by Mr. Hamilton, who was then a major, this gallant officer having been a
captain in the Thirty-second Regiment of Ohio Infantry. It was not until
September, 1863, that Captain Proctor, of the Eighteenth United States
Infantry, mustered in the Second and Third Battalions. In the fall of 1862
the First Battalion was put into shape and until January remained in Ohio,
and was drilled, but without horses. Later they were mounted and crossed
over into Kentucky, and kept watch on the roving bands of Confederates,
and at Pine Mountain Gap, June 16, 1863, they had their first battle. It
was not to be expected that men under such a leader would acquit themselves
badly, and on that day the Ninth Ohio Cavalry began to make history for
itself, to do honor to the state from which it came, and to render valuable
service to the country it was organized to defend. It engaged in sixty-four
battles and skirmishes. It was not until the spring of 1864 that the entire regi-
ment was together, the several battalions meeting at Pulaski, Tennessee, two
of the battalions having made a very gallant charge against Roddy's entire
brigade of Confederates, who fled before the gallant Ohioans. On July 10,
1864. the Ninth took part in Rousseau's great raid through Alabama, riding
through the garden of the South, where no Union soldier had ever been
before, skirmishing for fourteen days, fighting, tearing up railroads, burn-
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ing mills, factories and cotton, working day and night destroying the re-
sources of the enemy, — in fact, they reserved only three hours daily for rest
and sleep. Rarely in the history of warfare was there such riding as this.
It was a most successful raid, but it has never been given its rightful place
in history. Rousseau found Sherman’s army at Marietta, Georgia, and the
Ninth took part in the great Atlanta campaign. A battalion under Major
Bowles led the advance of the memorable flank movement when Sherman
threw invincible columns to the right, which soon ended the great campaign.
On the memorable march to the sea the regiment was conspicuous and was a
part of the army under that gallant leader, General Kilpatrick, and did heroic
work. In July, 1865, the survivors of the regiment returned to their homes,
and it is safe to say that none of those who are living today but feels proud
of the fact that he belonged to a regiment with such a splendid record.
Following is a list of the battles and skirmishes in which the regiment
engaged in 1863: Pine Mountain Gap, Big Creek Gap, Waltzburg, all in
Kentucky; Knoxville, Powell Valley, both in Tennessee; pursuit of Morgan,
siege of Knoxville; following were consecutive in 1864: Florence, repulse
of. an attack on Decatur, Center Star, Courtland Road, Rousseau’s raid, Coosa
River, Ten Islands, Talladega, Stone’s Ferry, Lochapoka, Auburn, Chesaw
Station, all in Alabama, with part of Rousseau’s raid in Georgia; siege of
Atlanta, East Point, Georgia: Chattahooche river, pursuit of Wheeler, pur-
suit of Forrest, all in Alabama; Jonesboro, Lovejoy, Bear Creek Station,
Macon, Griswoldsville, Milledgeville, Oconee River, Waynesboro, Louisville,
Rocky Creek Church, Brier Creek, Ebenezer Creek, siege of Savannah, all in
Georgia ; Campbellsville, Lawrenceburg, Tennessee ; Arnold’s Plantation. Alta-
maha Bridge, March to the Sea, Georgia; Taylor’s Creek, Barnwell, Willis-
ton, Aiken, Blackville, Gunters Bridge, Winnsborough. South Carolina; Lex-
ington, Broad River Bridge, Phillips’ Cross Roads, Rockingham, Salem
Grove, Monroe Cross Roads, Fayetteville, Taylor’s Hole Creek, Averasboro,
Bentonville, Faison’s Depot, Smithfield Railroad, Raleigh. Morrisville, Chapel
Hill and Bennett House, all North Carolina.
This splendid regiment was mustered out at Lexington, North Carolina,
July 20, 1865, and discharged at Camp Chase, Ohio, August 2d following.
The regiment was attached to the Second Brigade. Cavalry Division, Twenty-
third Corps, until March, 1864. Ordered to Athens, Alabama, and attached
to the cavalry command. Dodge’s left wing. Sixteenth Army Corps, until
May, 1864. then it was attached to Kilpatrick’s Second Brigade, Third Di-
vision. with which it remained until June, 1865.
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Thus it will be seen that Mr. Boor saw some strenuous service, and
according to his comrades he was always ready for duty and never swerved
from danger or a difficult task. Following is a roster of his comrades in
Company D : Emerson Benson, W. J. Boden, James Boileau, Joseph Bur-
goon, Levi Bowers, William Barkimer, David Baker, S. N. Cook, D. M.
Dougherty, John Double, Harrison H. Dodd, George Fisher. Abraham Fel-
ger, David R. Houser, L. H. Hughes, William Herron, William Henderson,
John Hill, Henry Heck, Lewis H. Immel, Jacob Johnson, John W. Kurtz,
J. A. Kister, Timothy Lyne, Byron McKenzie, John Moore, Joseph Marshall,
B. Mitchelson, George Morrison, W. A. Nichols, J. A. Petty, Cornelius Pettit,
John Rhodes, William Santell, James Singre, Joshua Stotsberry, John A.
Strauss. James A. Smith, Thomas C. Smith, John Sparr, J. A. Switzer,
Justus F. Watson, Sam F. Wireman, Sam S. Wyre, Joseph C. Wheeler,
Henry Wells.
Mr. Boor was taken prisoner on October 2, 1864, in Georgia and was
held at Macon for two weeks, and at Millen, Georgia, for six weeks. He
also saw the inside of prisons at Savannah and at Florence, South Carolina.
February 27, 1865, he was paroled and put on a boat at Wilmington, North
Carolina, eventually reached Annapolis, Maryland, from which place he went
to Columbus, Ohio, where, after a furlough of thirty days, he was dis-
charged on June 15, 1865. Mr. Boor enjoys the distinction of having par-
ticipated in the first engagement of the Civil war, the battle of Philippi,
West Virginia, on June 3, 1861, and he and a comrade captured the first
armed prisoner.
In 1869 Mr. Boor built a steam saw-mill on his place in Wayne town-
ship, this county, which he conducted without intermission for thirty years,
doing a very large business and becoming widely known as a mill and lumber
man. In 1878 and 1879 he served as township assessor, was elected ap-
praiser in the latter year and served one term. In 1884 be was again elected
assessor and in 1890 was re-elected land appraiser. In the fall of 1893 be
was elected infirmary director and served very acceptably in this, as in his
former public capacities, for a period of six years. He has always been
active in politics on the Democratic side. He has long been a member of
the United Brethren church at Madisonburg, Ohio, and was one of the organ-
izers who built the structure in 1876. The congregation started with about
thirty members and now lias seventy or more. Mr. Boor was trustee from
1875 to and he always took a great deal of interest in religious work.
He is a member of the Grand Army of the Republic. Given Post, No. 133,
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at Wooster, and ranks high among his old comrades, as well as among the
citizens of the county generally. He has been successful in business, promi-
nent in politics, and one of the factors in developing his part of the county.
On March 13, 1862, Mr. Boor married Elizabeth C. Carl, who was born
in Ashland county, Ohio, February 16, 1841. She is a daughter of Philip
and Otilla (Bush) Carl, who came from Germany and were early pioneers
of Ashland county. He died in 1844 and his widow married Philip Beck,
but both are now deceased. Four children have been born to Mr. and Mrs.
Boor, named as follows: George Clement, bom January 23. 1863, is a
druggist in Rocky River, Ohio, and married Adeline Wagner; Edwin Nich-
olas, born September 3, 18C6, is electrician for the Cleveland, Columbus &
Southwestern Electric Company, married Ora Hershey and has two children,
Ruth and Helen: Dr. Seymour C., born July 7. 1868, was educated at Cleve-
land and Baltimore, married Amanda Gingery and lives in Burbank, Ohio:
Effie Gertrude, born February 10, 1872, married F. O. Miller, a farmer of
Wayne township, and has three children, Marie, Harold and Gladys.
ISAAC N. HOUGH.
County auditor from 1903 to 1909 and for many years an educator of
wide repute, Isaac X. Hough is a native of Wayne county, Ohio, horn in
Chester township on July 12, 1849. He springs from an old and well known
Pennsylvania family that figured in the early history of various parts of the
Keystone state, but for many years the name has been a familiar sound in
northern Ohio, his father, David Hough, moving with his parents to Wayne
county when but six years old and spending the remainder of his life on the
family homestead in Chester township. By occupation David Hough was a
tiller of the soil, which useful and honorable calling he followed for many
years with gratifying success. He was a man of high character and eminently
respectable social standing, wielded a strong influence for good among his
neighbors and friends and was long esteemed one of the leading citizens. He
departed this life at the age of sixty years, one month and one day, and left
to his posterity the memory of noble deeds and high ideals and a name un-
stained by the slightest suspicion of dishonor.
Mary Showalter. wife of David Hough, was also of Pennsylvania birth
and. like her husband, came to Ohio in early life and spent her youth and
young womanhood in the county of Wayne. She combined many noble qual-
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ities of mind and heart, which were reproduced in her offspring, and ended
her earthly course in the year 1895, esteemed and honored by all who knew
her.
The children of David and Mary Hough, eleven in number, are as fol-
lows: Lucv, wife of Edmund Keyser, of Wooster, Ohio; Daniel, who lives
in Cass county, Missouri; John, deceased; William, of Belding, Michigan;
Matilda, deceased, who was the wife of George W. Forbes, of Cleveland,
Ohio: Sarah Jane, who is unmarried and lives in the city of Wooster; Isaac
N., the subject of this review; James A., deceased; Margaret W., who mar-
ried J. W. Crummel, of Apple Creek, this state; Ida A., wife of C. B. Burch-
field, also a resident of Apple Creek, and Clara M.. who was basely murdered
some years ago in the city of Mansfield, Ohio.
Isaac N. Hough is descended from sturdy and eminently honorable
ancestry and inherits to a marked degree many of the sterling qualities of
his antecedents. He was reared in close touch with nature on the farm and
grew to the full stature of well-rounded manhood under excellent home in-
fluences, learning while still young those lessons of industry and thrift which
make for success in material matters and the principles of morality and
probity which constitute such important parts of every symmetrically devel-
oped character. Under the wholesome discipline of farm labor he laid
broad and deep the solid foundations upon which his subsequent career as
an educator and public spirited official rests and to this rugged school of
experience attributes much of the success which has made him an influential
factor and recognized leader among his fellow men. At the proper age he
entered the district school of his neighborhood, where his progress was
commendable, and he later attended Smithville Academy several terms, in
which he made rapid advancement in the higher branches of learning. Leav-
ing the latter institution with a well disciplined mind, he engaged in teach-
ing and during the thirty years ensuing devoted his attention very closely
and conscientiously to that useful and noble work, attaining, in the mean-
time. much more than local repute as an educator. It is a fact worthy of
note that Mr. Hough’s long experience as a teacher was confined to a very
small area of Wayne county. All of his thirty winter and twenty-two summer
schools, with the exception of four terms, were taught in four districts, his
frequent retention for long periods of service in the same place bearing elo-
quent testimony to his ability as an instructor and to his great personal
popularity with pupils and patrons.
In the year 1897 *^r- Hough entered the auditor’s office as deputy
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under A. B. Peckinpaugh, and continued in that capacity until 1902, when
he was nominated for the position by the local Democracy and triumphantly
elected in the fall of that year. Being familiar with every detail of the office
and obliging in his relations with the public, he discharged his duties in
such a capable and satisfactory manner that he was chosen his own successor
in 1905. As an official he was industrious and painstaking and his loyalty
to the people's interests as custodian of one of their most important trusts
has earned for him the high esteem in which he is held by his fellow men
as a public servant and sterling worth as an intelligent, broad-minded and
progressive citizen.
Mr. Hough was united in marriage on the 10th day of March, 1887, with
Lillie A. Martin, of Wooster, daughter of John Martin, a well-known resi-
dent of the city, the union proving mutually happy and resulting in the birth
of six children, of whom two are deceased. Howard E., the first born of
the family, died in infancy; Waldo O., the second in order of birth, was grad-
uated from the city high school at the early age of sixteen and then entered
the Gem City Business College at Quincy, Illinois, where he completed the
full course and attained to high honor as a student. On graduating from
the latter institution he became bookkeeper for the Gerstenslager Buggy
Company of Wooster, but two years later resigned the position to enter
the Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio. After one year he had to give
up college work on account of his father's illness. He is now assistant state
examiner of county records. He is an exceptionally intelligent young man
and, actuated by a laudable ambition to succeed, has before him a promis-
ing and brilliant future. Beulah M., the oldest daughter, like her brother,
is much given to study and literature and is one of the brightest and most
intelligent young ladies of the city in which she lives. She, too, made a
remarkable record as a student, completing the high school course when
she was but fifteen years of age, being the youngest person ever graduated
from that institution. Later she took a full course in bookkeeping, stenog-
raphy and typewriting in the business college at Wooster, served as first
deputy auditor under her father, and is now in the Citizens National Bank.
Blanche I., the second daughter, sustains the high reputation of her brother
and sister, being an ambitious student and standing among the first of her
classes in the city high school. The fifth in order of birth died in infancy,
the next being a daughter. Clara M.. a bright and interesting young lady
who is prosecuting her studies in the high school, where she has already
achieved a creditable record.
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Mr. Hough is proud of his children and has provided them with excep-
tional educational advantages, which, to their credit, they fully appreciate.
They heartily second all of his efforts in their behalf and thus far have fully
realized his ardent hopes and high expectations, proving, as already indicated,
remarkably intelligent and ambitious and giving promise of future honor and
usefulness in whatever stations in life they may be called to fill. Mrs. Hough
is a lady of fine mind and beautiful character whose refining and elevating in-
fluence has contributed much to the moral discipline as well as the intellectual
advancement of her offspring. She has been an able and judicious counsellor
to her husband, assisting him in all his efforts, encouraging him in his aspira-
tions and presiding over his home with the grace and dignity characteristic of
the intelligent and broad minded American housewife of today. The entire
family belong to the Methodist Episcopal church and are deeply interested in
the various lines of religious work under the auspices of the organization, be-
sides giving their assistance and influence to all enterprises and movements for
the general welfare of the community.
JAMES LLOYD GRAY.
A due measure of success invariably results from clearly defined purpose
and consecutive effort in the affairs of life, but in following out the career of
one who has attained success by his own efforts there comes into view the in-
trinsic individuality which has made such accomplishments possible. Such
attributes were evidently possessed by James L. Gray, for many years promi-
nent in the commercial and industrial life of the city of Wooster and he suc-
ceeded in leaving the indelible imprint of his personality upon the lives of all
with whom he came into contact. He was born in Milton, Northumberland
county, Pennsylvania, in 1832. His father was of Scotch and his mother of
German ancestry. They came to Pennsylvania in what historians are pleased
to call “an early day,” the mother dying there when her son, James L., was a
small child, consequently he was reared by his uncle, Samuel Blain, who lived
on a farm near the birthplace of the subject.
When sixteen years of age, Mr. Gray began life for himself, first obtain-
ing a position as clerk on a steamboat that plied the waters of the Mississippi,
for the life of a riverman in those days was a fascinating one and appealed
very strongly to the boyish imagination of the subject. This life he followed
for three years, during which time he had occasion to ascend and descend all
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the navigable rivers tributary to the Mississippi, one of the most notable and
interesting trips being to the Yellowstone Park in quest of furs.
But finally, tiring of life on the river, Mr. Gray returned to his home
town, Milton, Pennsylvania, and served an apprenticeship in the saddler's
trade, after which he located at New Brighton, Pennsylvania. There he met
and afterwards married Eunice Magaw, a native of Beaver county, Pennsyl-
vania, and soon after his marriage he brought his young bride to Wooster,
Wayne county, Ohio, where he at once engaged in business, and eventually
became one of the leading business men of the county.
Mr. Gray was one of the loyal sons of the North who sacrificed the pleas-
ures of home and opportunities of business to aid in suppressing the rebellion,
enlisting in 1864 in Company E, One Hundred and Sixty-ninth Regiment Ohio
Volunteer Infantry, and served with credit in the famous Army of the Po-
tomac, having been in the quartermaster's department a part of the time. After
the war he returned to Wooster and for a time was superintendent of the
Home mills. In 1875 be began dealing in coal, lime and builders* supplies,
which business grew until it reached very large proportions and which he con-
tinued until his death, which occurred on June 8. 1886, at the age of fifty-four
years.
Mr. and Mrs. Gray were the parents of the following children: Charles
M. Gray, a well-known resident of Wooster, Ohio: Mrs. Cora B. Plummer, de-
ceased: Mrs. Emma E. Orr, deceased: Mrs. Eunice Jeffries, of Charlotte,
North Carolina: William L. Gray, a resident of Wooster.
James L. Gray was a man of pleasing disposition, honorable in public and
private life, and he merited the high esteem in which he was universally held.
He was a loyal Republican, taking a very active interest in political affairs.
He served as a member of the volunteer fire department, which in his day was
an important factor in the life of Wooster. Fraternally he was a member of
the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias and Knights of
Honor, and he also be longed to the Grand Army of the Republic. He was
one of the pillars of the English Lutheran church, having served as a member
of the building committee in the erection of the Tabernacle on North Mar-
ket street.
JOHN MEIER.
Admired and respected for his general intelligence, as well as for his
sterling qualities as a neighbor and a citizen, no man in the town of Fred-
ericksburg stands higher in public esteem than the worthy individual, the
salient facts of whose life and character are herein set forth.
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John Meier is a native of the little republic of Switzerland, having
been born at Brugg, in the canton of Aargau, on the first day of September,
1831. He received some education in his native land and also attended school
one term after coming to the United States. He learned the trade of shoe-
making in his youth, at which he became an expert. In 1853 he determined
to try his fortunes in the New World, and accordingly set sail for the United
States, landing in due time at the port of New York. From there he went
to Cleveland, Ohio, remaining there from June to November, in which
month he located in Saltcreek township. Holmes county, Ohio, which was
his home during the following six years. During this time he was employed
at his trade of shoemaking. Locating then at Fredericksburg, Wayne county,
he remained there three years, working at the shoemaker's bench, and at the
end of that time he moved onto the farm which he now occupies and that
has been his home continuously since. The farm, which is located in sec-
tion 23, is a splendid piece of rural land, about seventy acres of it being in
cultivation. The improvements on the place are complete and substantial
and all things about the farm indicate thrift, industry and general prosperity,
the property being now considered a valuable one. In i860 Mr. Meier went
to Switzerland for his two brothers, and in 1862 he sent for his parents and
family and they made their home here with him until their deaths, a num-
ber of years ago. After coming to the farm, Mr. Meier also carried on
the occupation of shoemaking to some extent, more as a matter of accommo-
dation than necessity, but he has relinquished that work, being now too old
for steady, hard work. In his first coming to Ohio he met with some
peculiar and occasionally exciting experiences. The country was extremely
wild and at that time there were yet many Indians in the northern part of
Ohio, the town of Fredericksburg being an important trading post. Bridges
were practically unknown and roads were few and far between, the common
routes for travel being simple trails through the dense forests. Massillon
was the nearest town of any considerable size, and the early settlers were
compelled to endure hardships and inconveniences little appreciated at the
present day.
In 1861 Mr. Meier was united in marriage to Matilda Merilat. a sister
to Captain Merilat and a daughter of David Merilat. She was a native of
Switzerland and at the age of seventeen years was brought to this# country
bv her parents. In his native land David Merilat was a school teacher, but
after coming to this country he became a prominent and successful farmer of
Wayne county. To Mr. and Mrs. Meier have been born eight children, brief
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mention of whom is made as follows : Sophia married first Charles Fletcher,
later Charles Hipp, is the mother of five children, and lives at Marion, Ohio;
Ida is the wife of Jacob Barnes, of near Nashville, Holmes county, and is
the mother of nine children; Fannie is the wife of Hiram Sanderson, of Salt-
creek township, and is the mother of four children ; Mary is at home; William,
at home; John, who married Sadie Kane, lives in Saltcreek township and
has one child, Matilda; Emma married Eugene Rouhier, of Stark county,
and they have six children; Charles, who married Maria Fellows, lives at
Garretsville. and they have one child.
In politics Mr. Meier is a Democrat and has always taken a wide-awake
interest in public affairs, though not a politician. However, he has during
his long life here served his fellow-citizens acceptably in a number of local
offices. In religion he is a member of the Reformed church at Mount Eaton.
He is widely known and has the respect and confidence of a large circle of
friends. His long and busy life is drawing to a close, but when he finally
passes over the river it will be with the knowledge that his life has been
well and honorably spent.
DAVID MYERS.
The true spirit of progress and honorable achievement has been manifest
in the career of the well known and highly esteemed citizen whose name in-
troduces this sketch and who, since discontinuing the strenuous life which was
characterized by such signal success, has been living in honorable retirement
in the city of Wooster. His life has been one of fulness and completeness of
vigor and inflexible integrity and while engaged in the vocation to which in
the main his attention has been devoted, he accomplished great and lasting
good for the material progress of various cities and communities and at the
same time failed not to reap the reward which his industry and skill so richly
deserved.
David Myers is a native of Wayne county, Ohio, and a descendant on the
paternal side of a long line of sturdy German ancestry, which was first rep-
resented in America by his father, Daniel Myers, who came to this country
from Wurtemherg about the year 1814 and settled in Wilmington, Delaware.
After spending a few years in that city he removed to I^ancaster county,
Pennsylvania, thence when a young man to Wayne county. Ohio, where in
1828 he married Martha DeWese, who was born and reared in the county
of Columbiana, this state. In his younger days Daniel Myers was a cooper,
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but in after life he became a fanner, which vocation he followed until his
death, in 1873. Mrs. Myers survived her husband five years, departing this
life on the home farm in Chester township in 1878. She sprang from an old
and highly respected family, that figured actively in the early history of eastern
Ohio and, tracing her ancestry further back, it appears that several of the
DeWese family were soldiers in the Revolutionary war and that two of Mrs.
Myers’ brothers served with distinction in the war of 1812. By reason of
this connection with the struggle for independence, three of Mr. Myers’ daugh-
ters hold membership with the Daughters of the American Revolution, a pa-
triotic society composed of female descendants of the soldiers of that war.
Daniel and Martha Myers were parents of eight children, of whom five are
living at the present time, viz : Mrs. Rebecca Reichard, whose home is in
Iowa near the town of Knoxville; David, of this review; Mrs. Elizabeth
Berkey, of Ashland county, Ohio; John, a resident of Chester township,
Wayne county, and Mrs. Anna Powers, who lives in the city of Wooster.
David Myers was born December 16, 1833, an(l spent his childhood and
youth on the family homestead in Chester township where he early became
familiar with the practical duties of the farm and learned to appreciate the
true dignity and worth of honest toil. In the free, outdoor experience of
wood and field he grew up strong and rugged and well fitted for the active
career upon which he subsequently entered and while still a young man he be-
gan to formulate the plans for his future course of action. In a little log
school house not far from the parental home he obtained a fair knowledge
of such branches of learning as were then taught and, having early manifested
decided predilection for mechanical work, he began, ere attaining his majority,
to learn the trade of a carpenter, in which he soon acquired much more than
ordinary efficiency and skill. Having mastered his craft, he worked at the
same for some time in a subordinate capacity, but, actuated by a laudable am-
bition to extend his operations, he afterwards became a contractor and it was
not long until the high reputation of his work caused a wide demand for his
services.
Without following in detail Mr. Myers’ long and eminently honorable
career as a contractor and builder, suffice it to state that from the beginning
he was animated by a desire to excel and that during his active years he erected
many buildings in various cities of his own and other states which still stand
as monuments to his superior mechanical skill. Among the more notable pub-
lic edifices under his direction in Wooster are the Methodist Episcopal church,
the .City .Hall, a number of the university buildings, the Overholt residence,
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pronounced the finest private dwelling in the city, besides many others, to say
nothing of numerous structures throughout the country. His fame as a me-
chanic extending far beyond the limits of his own county, he contracted for a
number of buildings in New York City and Brooklyn, including residences,
churches, halls and various other public edifices, and later did much work in
his line in several eastern and central states and throughout the northwest.
The beautiful and imposing Methodist Episcopal church at Duluth, Minne-
sota, one of the finest and most attractive temples of worship in the state and
representing a cost of one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, was erected
by him, as were also similar edifices in Burlington, Iowa, Monmouth, Illinois,
New Rochelle, New York, and in many other cities and towns, all of which
bear evidence of a high order of architectural skill and efficiency of workman-
ship, bespeaking a thorough mastery of the builder's art.
Mr. Myers was in Iowa when the country became disrupted by the late
Civil war and, being loyal to the government and its institutions, he did not
hesitate when the call came for volunteers to help put down the rebellion.
Enlisting in the Fifteenth Regiment Iowa Infantry in 1861, he was soon at the
scene of action, rendering valiant service for the Union and during his three
years at the front his conduct under all circumstances was that of a brave and
gallant soldier who shrank from no danger and was ever ready to go where
duty called. He shared with his comrades the vicissitudes and fortunes of
war in a number of noted campaigns and battles, including Corinth, where he
served under General Belknap, and won promotion to a lieutenancy by meri-
torious conduct while under fire at Pittsburg Landing, Iuka, siege and capture
of Vicksburg and numerous other engagements, receiving at Corinth a pain-
ful wound in the arm, which, however, did not long incapacitate him from
service.
At the expiration of his period of enlistment, which included three of the
most strenuous years of the war. Mr. Myers was discharged with an honorable
record and, returning to civil life, resumed contracting and building, which he
followed with success and profit until 1886, when he discontinued active labor
to spend the remainder of his days in retirement. By industry, judicious
management and wise economy he amassed a handsome competency, amply
sufficient indeed to enable him to spend the future free from anxiety and care
and. being thus fortunately situated, he is enjoying that rest which he has so
well earned and the many blessings which have come to him as the result of
his many years of endeavor.
Mr. Myers returned to Ohio soon after the war closed and in 1865 was
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united in marriage with Elizabeth Miller, daughter of Jacob Miller, of Somer-
set county, Pennsylvania. When five years old she was brought to Ohio by
her parents and at the celebration of her nuptials was living in Wayne county,
where she had made her home for a number of years. Mr. and Mrs. Myers
had five children, namely: Viola, deceased; Martha, who married ex-County
Clerk David Mussleman, of Wooster; John, assistant cashier of the Wayne
County Bank; Blanche, wife of John Ames, chemist of the Ohio Experiment
Station at Wooster, and Miss Claude Myers, who is still with her parents.
Mr. Myers manifests a commendable interest in all matters pertaining to
the progress of the city of his residence and the good of the people and keeps
in touch with the times on the leading questions and issues of the day. He is
a director of the Wayne County National Bank, and in addition to a beautiful
home on Beall avenue and other property in Wooster, owns a fine farm in the
county to which he gives much personal attention. Fraternally, he holds
membership with the Masonic, Odd Fellows and Royal Arcanum orders and
politically wields an influence for the Democratic party. The Methodist
church holds his religious creed, and with his wife and certain of his children
he is a regular attendant of the congregation worshiping in Wooster, also a
liberal contributor to its support and to the various lines of work under its
auspices. His son John and daughter Mrs. Ames subscribe to the Presby-
terian faith, both being active and consistent members of the church of that
denomination in Wooster. Personally Mr. Myers stands high in the esteem
and confidence of his neighbors and fellow citizens and is regarded as one of
the enterprising and well-to-do men of the city in which he resides. Courteous
and kindly in his relations with others, an influential factor in the business
world and ready at all times to assist laudable measures for the general wel-
fare, he has lived to high and noble ends and the future awaits him with
bounteous rewards.
THOMAS ARTHUR GRAVEN, M. D.
Of high academic and professional attainments and holding worthy pres-
tige among the successful medical men of Wooster, where he has been actively
engaged in the practice of his profession since 1904, Dr. Thomas Arthur
Graven occupies a large place in the esteem of his fellow citizens and merits
specific notice in a work devoted to the representative men of his adopted city
and county. He was born January 6, 1871, in Holmes county. Ohio, where
his paternal ancestors settled in an early day and figured prominently in the
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development and progress of that part of the state. The Graven family is of
German origin and in the old country were originally known by the name of
Gravenstein. The first member of the family to emigrate to America ap-
pears to have been the Doctor's great-great-grandfather (given name un-
known). who settled near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A son, John Graven,
born October 5, 1758, in Germany, was four years old when he came to
America, locating at Philadelphia. He grew to maturity on the family estate
near that place, married Rebecca Randall, who was bom in that city in the
year 1762, and about the year 1816 migrated to what is now Holmes county,
Ohio, where he secured land, developed a farm and in due time became a pub-
lic spirited and praiseworthy citizen. He was a conspicuous figure in the pio-
neer history of the above county and there spent the remainder of his days,
dying on February 22, 1833, on the land he had purchased from the govern-
ment. His' wife survived him until 1848, on March 6th of which year she.
too, was called to her final reward. She and her husband were Quakers.
Among the children of John and Rebecca Graven was a son by the name of
Thomas, who was born December 2, 1805, in Philadelphia, and who subse-
quently became a manufacturer of powder, in connection with which he also
had important agricultural interests in Holmes county, Ohio, where he re-
moved with his parents when about eleven years of age. Elizabeth McKel-
vey, who, on October 11, 1838, became the wife of Thomas Graven, was born
in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, September 12, 1818, and belonged
to one of the old and highly esteemed families of that part of the Keystone
state. She bore her husband nine children, and departed this life September
9, 1893, at Holmesville, Ohio, where her husband, on December 12, 1871, also
breathed his last, after a continuous residence of fifty-five years.
Marion Graven, son of Thomas and Elizabeth Graven, was born in
Holmes county, Ohio, February 4, 1847, ancl m his young manhood, Decem-
ber 31, 1868, married Sarah Jane McCulloch, whose birth occurred near
Holmesville on the 17th day of January, 1851. Mrs. Graven's father, David
McCulloch, was born at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, December 20, 1808, and died
in Holmes county, Ohio, February 25, 1892, after living on the same farm for
a period of eighty years. He filled many important offices of trust and was a
member of the school board and a justice of the peace. His parents were
Hugh and Elizabeth (Gibson) McCulloch, the former born in Fife county,
town of Leven. Scotland, in 1759. and the latter born in county Down, Ire-
land, in 1770. Hugh McCulloch came to America in 1780 and taught school
in Pennsylvania and later in Ohio, having been a well educated man and a
teacher of some note before leaving his native land. His wife came to
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America with her parents in 1788, on account of religious persecution, and
married in 1793. She joined him in Pennsylvania in 1788 and on April 14,
1 81 1, he moved to the new settlements in Holmes county, Ohio, where, at
various times, the settlers were obliged to take refuge in a block house on ac-
count of the hostility of the Indians. Mrs. McCulloch died March 18, 1814,
and her husband on the 6th of January, 1836. Hugh McCulloch served in
the war of 1812, under Generals Meigs and Shane, participated in a number
of battles and minor engagements and earned an honorable record as a brave
and gallant soldier. He was a man of wide intelligence and varied attain-
ments, did much to popularize and disseminate the cause of education among
the settlers of Holmes county, and his memory is still cherished by the people
of the community in which he spent so many years of his life.
Marion Graven followed agricultural pursuits all his life, owning nearly
four hundred acres of splendid farming land. He was successful in his busi-
ness affairs and stood high in the esteem of all who knew him. He was a
prominent and active member of the Presbyterian church, in which he was an
elder for twenty-four years, and he was a member of the Presbyterian general
assembly which met at Saratoga, New York, in 1894. He was a Republican
in politics and took an intelligent interest in public affairs, though not in any
sense a seeker after public office. His death occurred January 9, 1903, at his
home in Loudonville, Ohio, where he had moved with his family in 1901.
Marion and Sarah Jane Graven reared a family of three children, the
oldest of whom is Dr. Thomas Arthur Graven, of this review. David Homer
Graven, the second in order of birth, was graduated from the Ohio State
University when a young man, having taken the full course in the law depart-
ment, and in 1900 he received the degree of Master of Arts from the North-
western Ohio University at Ada. For some time he gave his attention to the
legal profession, but for some years past he has been cashier of the First Na-
tional Bank at Loudonville, where he makes his home. John Elmer Graven,
the youngest of the family, was graduated from the University, of Wooster
with the. class of 1899, then went to Harvard Law School and afterwards went
to Texas, where his death occurred on April 15, 1900. The mother of these
children is still living and resides at Loudonville. where she has many warm
friends who have learned to prize her for the sterling qualities of mind and
heart which she inherits from a long line of sturdy Scotch-Irish ancestry.
In the year in which Dr. Thomas Arthur Graven was born (1871) his
parents changed their residence to Perrysville. in the county of Ashland, but in
1883 they returned to Holmes county, where the future physician and surgeon
received his early educational training. He made rapid progress in his studies
and it was not long until he was qualified to teach, which useful calling he
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followed in connection with agricultural pursuits until taking up the study of
medicine, for which he had long manifested a decided preference. In due
time he yielded to this predilection by entering Jefferson Medical College,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from which he was graduated May 15, 1900. He
immediately thereafter located at the town of Mohican, Ashland county,
where he soon built up a lucrative practice and earned an honorable reputa-
tion as a capable and progressive physician and surgeon. After four years'
successful practice at the above place, Doctor Graven decided to locate in a
larger and more inviting field, accordingly, in March, 1904, he opened an office
in Wooster, where his abilities soon won recognition, as his continuous ad-
vancement and eminent professional success abundantly attests, he being at this
time one of the leading physicians of the city with an extensive patronage
which is steadily growing in magnitude and far-reaching influence. Doctor
Graven is a close and critical student, who keeps in close touch with everything
relating to his calling and, although younger than many of his contemporaries,
he already stands well to the front among his professional brethren of Wooster
and Wayne county, and, judging by his past achievements, his friends and the
public in general predict for him a bright and promising future.
Doctor Graven, on September 26, 1895, was happily married to Tamzon
Finney, who was born in Holmes county, Ohio. December 13, 1875, the daugh-
ter of Thomas D. and Lois (Numbers) Finney. To this union has been bom
one son, Marion Finney Graven, born November 9, 1901, a bright and intelli-
gent boy who gives promise of a brilliant future. Doctor and Mrs. Graven
occupy an important place in the social life of their adopted city and have
many warm friends and admirers in the society circles to which they belong.
They are both members of the First Presbyterian church at Wooster. In
politics the Doctor is a stanch supporter of the Republican party, and in the
election of 1908 he was his party's candidate for coroner of Wayne county.
Doctor Graven is a member of the Masonic order, belonging to Ebenezer
Lodge, No. 33. at Wooster, and also the chapter of Royal Arch Masons. He
also holds membership in Lodge No. 42. Independent Order of Odd Fellows,
and Lodge No. 22, Knights of Pythias, both at W ooster. Dr. Graven owns
a beautiful home at North Beechev. corner of Larwell street.
JAMES MEIER.
To a great extent the prosperity of the agricultural sections of our great
country is due to the honest industry, the sturdy perseverance and the wise
economy which so prominently characterizes the foreign element that has en-
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tered largely into our population. By comparison with their “old country”
surroundings, these people have readily recognized the fact that in America
lie the greatest opportunities for the man of ambition and energy. And be-
cause of this many have broken the ties of home and native land and have
entered earnestly into the task of gaining in the New World a home and a
competence. Among this class may be mentioned the late James Meier,
who, by reason of years of indefatigable labor and honest effort, not only
acquired a well-merited material prosperity, but also richly earned the highest
esteem of all with whom he was associated.
James Meier was born in Switzerland, that small, rugged country that
has sent so many enterprising and valuable citizens to the great Republic of
the West, his birth occurring in the year 1836. in Brugg, canton of Aargau,
and there he grew to manhood and was educated in the common schools.
He was a member of an honored and hard-working family and when a mere
lad began learning the shoemaker’s trade, at which he soon became an
expert and which he successfully followed for a period of thirty-seven years.
Being thus skilled, a good judge of leather goods and always honest in his
work, his output was eagerly sought after and he was always very busy
at his bench.
His brother, John Meier, a sketch of whom appears elsewhere in this
book, came to America, and, finding conditions favorable here, returned home
in i860 and upon coming back to the United States, James Meier and another
brother accompanied him, their parents following them later, making their
home in Wayne county, Ohio, until their deaths.
James Meier located four and one-half miles south of Wooster, where
he became very comfortably established, having a neat home and acquiring
a good little farm in Franklin township which he worked to advantage in
connection with shoemaking, having made many valuable improvements of
his seventy-eight acres there. The farm is now operated by his widow and
children and yields them a very comfortable income.
Mr. Meier was loyal to his own flag, and served as a soldier in the Swit-
zerland army for a number of years, in which he is said to have discharged
every duty faithfully; and after coming to America he was no less loyal
to our institutions, thus becoming a very welcome citizen. In his native
country he belonged to the Reformed church, and was always noted for his
peaceable, honest relations with his neighbors, all of whom liked and re-
spected him.
The death of James Meier occurred in September, 1908, and his remains
rest in the cemetery at Fredericksburg.
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Mr. Meier was a single man when he came to America, and in 1864 he
married Eliza McCullough, of Holmes county, where her people have long
been well known. Mr. and Mrs. Meier reared a large family, fifteen children
having been born to them, thirteen sons and two daughters, named as fol-
lows: Albert, George, William, Lucinda, Hugh, Edward, John (deceased),
Victor, Maynard, Cyrene, Jacob, Atena, Joseph, Virgil, and Xeal.
JAMES DINSMORE BEER, M. D.
Among the successful physicians and respected citizens of Wayne county,
Ohio, is Dr. James Dinsmore Beer, of Wooster, who is a native son of the
Buckeye state, having been born at Canton, Stark county, on the 5th of Sep-
tember, 1858. He is descended from sturdy Scotch-Irish stock, his great-
grandfather, Thomas Beer, having been a native of county Antrim, Ireland,
from whence he emigrated to America in 1722. He settled at Easton, Pennsyl-
vania, where he followed the pursuit of farming until his death, which occurred
in 1 8 1 1 . His wife bore the maiden name of Aura Aten and they became the
parents of a large family. Among these children was Thomas, the subject’s
grandfather, who was born at Eaton, Pennsylvania, and became a Presby-
terian minister, in the pulpit of which church he acquired considerable distinc-
tion. He removed to Wayne county, Ohio, in 1827 and was among the first
ministers of his church in this county. His first charge here was in Greene
township, after which he preached in succession at Wayne church, Congress
church, Lattasburg (or Mount Hope) and Jeromeville. After serving many
years as a faithful servant of his Master, he retired from active work and re-
moved to Ashland, settling on a farm, where he spent his remaining days.
His death occurred in 1886, when he was about ninety years old. At Pitts-
burg, Pennsylvania, he married Margaret Cameron, and they became the par-
ents of twelve children, one of whom was a son, also named Thomas, who was
born near the Wayne church. Wayne county, on September 7, 1832. He se-
cured a good education and has been for many years a successful lawyer at
Bucvrus, Ohio, to which point he moved in i860 from Canton. He has risen
to a position of distinction in his profession and for twenty years he rendered
efficient service as a jurist. From 1873 to 1884 he served as judge of the
common pleas court of Crawford county and from the latter year until 1893
as judge of the circuit court. He is a man of high attainments, whose sterling
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worth and high ability has been widely recognized. His wife, the subject’s
mother, bore the maiden name of Tabitha Mary Dinsmore and was born in
York county, Pennsylvania, October 14, 1828. Her parents were James A.
and Grizzee (Collins) Dinsmore. James Dinsmore was a pioneer settler of
his section of Ohio, having entered land in 1814 in what was then Wayne
county, but is now in Ashland county. This worthy couple have had born to
them the following children: Mary Margaret, who died in 1866; James D.,
the subject of this sketch; Thomas, a farmer at Bucyrus, this state; William
C., a prominent financier at Yonkers, New York; Dorcas G., who is principal
of a public school at Yonkers, New York; Katharine J., of Bucyrus; Robert
L., deputy postmaster at Yonkers, New York; Mary E., a professional singer,
also residing at Yonkers, New York; one, a twin of Robert, died in infancy.
James Dinsmore Beer removed with his parents to Bucyrus when two
years old and in that city he received his preliminary education. After com-
pleting the public school course, he was for two years engaged in teaching
school, and then for a number of years he followed various pursuits, including
working with a crew of civil engineers, and he was also employed for a time
in compiling county histories. During this time his absorbing ambition was to
secure funds with which to obtain a higher education. From 1883 to 1886 he
was engaged in the retail drug business at Kingston, Tennessee, and in the
latter year was enabled to carry out his long-cherished plans. He entered the
Starling Medical College, at Columbus, Ohio, and in 1889 he was graduated at
that well-known institution, with the degree of Doctor of Medicine. On
April 1st of that year he entered upon the active practice of his profession at
Wooster, Ohio, and has remained continuously in the practice here since, a
period of twenty years. He engages in the general practice of medicine only,
not caring for the surgical feature of the science. He has had marked suc-
cess in the treatment of patients and has always commanded his full share
of the public patronage, being regarded as a safe, conservative and careful
doctor. He has a well-selected library of technical works and keeps in close
touch with the latest advances in the healing art. He is associated with his
fellow practitioners through his membership in the Wayne County Medical
Society, the Ohio State Medical Society and the American Medical Associa-
tion.
- Fraternally. Dr. Beer is a member of Ebenezer Lodge, Free and Accepted
Masons, at Wooster, of which he is a past master. He was raised to the degree
of a Master Mason in Union Lodge. No. 38, at Kingston, Tennessee, which
lodge was instituted in 1796, having been the thirty-eighth Masonic lodge in-
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stituted in America. Dr. Beer is a man of large physique, weighing in the
neighborhood of three hundred pounds, and possesses a disposition correspond-
ingly generous. He enjoys a large acquaintance and is well liked among all
classes.
On the 22d of September, 1884, Dr. Beer was united in marriage with
Jeane L. Thoburn. She was a native of Wheeling, West Virginia, and because
of the death of her father while she was yet in infancy, she was reared by her
grandfather. Her father. Dr. Joseph Thoburn, was during the Civil war
colonel of the First Regiment West Virginia Infantry (Union), and was killed
at the battle of Cedar Creek, October 19, 1864. At the time of his death he
was in command of the First Division, Army of West Virginia, under Gen-
eral Sheridan, and the latter, in his published work on the Civil war, gives
Colonel Thoburn conspicuous mention. Colonel Thoburn was of a notable
family, his brother, Bishop James Thoburn, being one of the most prominent
figures in the Methodist Episcopal church. Going to India as one of the pioneer
missionaries to the Mohammedans, he labored there continuously for fifty
years, being honored by his church with the rank of missionary bishop of
India. He is a man of marked and versatile ability and met with wonderful
success in the foreign field. A sister, Isabelle Thoburn, now deceased, was for
several years the very successful president of a college at Lucknow, India.
Other members of the Thoburn family have been distinguished in various lines.
To Dr. and Mrs. Beer have been born the following children : Mary Margaret,
born January 10, 1887, is a teacher in the public schools of Wooster; Thomas,
born November 22, 1888, Jeane Lyle, born May 3, 1893, are both at home
and are pursuing their education, as is Dorcas A., who was born November
14. 1894.
JOSEPH WELLINGTON LEHR.
J. \Y. Lehr was first introduced to this planet January 16, 1859, in Chester
township, Wavne county, Ohio, and is a son of Abraham and Susan B. (Carl)
Lehr. His father was one of the early settlers of Wavne county, removing
here from Pennsylvania and first locating in Canaan township, subsequently
removing to Wavne township, later to Chester township. He followed the
vocation of farming, which seems to have been the pursuit adopted and prose-
cuted by his ancestors for generations. The subject of this sketch was a strong
and active youth, and performed the boy’s and afterward the young man’s part
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in assisting his father in the various duties that are associated with and lie
within the scope of the plans and processes of farming. He availed himself
of the opportunities and advantages made possible at that period to attend the
country schools, where he was industrious and studious, making commendable
progress and acquiring good grades in his different studies and all assign-
ments made by his teachers. He then resolved and executed the resolution
to register as a student at Ada, then under the exclusive supervision, manage-
ment and control of his cousin. Prof. Henry Lehr, then to Smithville for three
years, when he entered upon his career as teacher, acting in this capacity for
one year, or from 1875 to 1879. When he was yet in his first teens it was his
boyish disposition and determination to become a physician. There being in
his present mind a glamour, fascination, an animating and inspiring halo, en-
circling the practice and the profession, this seemed to be the predominant
thought, the distinctive and separate aspiration, the lode-star of his life, his
studies at the district school, at Smithville, at Ada, and his other and co-related
pursuits. It must be remembered that if it was a youthful, it was likewise a
wise, commendable and honorable ambition, in the fact that he possessed the
intelligent independence and judgment to decide for himself, to make the choice
for himself, as to his life-work, present and future, upon the wisdom of which
selection hinged future destiny.
Personal friends, intimate acquaintances and parental influence and direc-
tion played no part, or if so, no important one in dictating or even suggesting
the course or pursuit this young man should or might adopt. His inclinations
were not to be a farmer, after the manner and example of his father, or a
merchant, a man of business, a teacher, lawyer, or preacher — simply and only
a physician. It may therefore be logically conjectured, and philosophically
deduced, that, by this uniform preparation, invariable expression of purpose,
were the keynotes sounded by a strong and flexible determination and will,
supported by a young but discreet judgment, which of themselves were fore-
shadowing the avaunt couriers of his subsequent success in the profession of
his boyhood's selection.
Success was then coming half-way to meet him. His aptitude and genius
for his work was congenital; it was born with him. Selftrust in his case
proved to be the first secret of success and it was the best test of his capacity
and character. There was no doubt or indecision in his composition ; opposi-
tion and competition did not dishearten him, for they operate as whetstones
by which a well-balanced highly tempered nature are polished and sharpened.
His student and college years were a series of self-denials of rest, recreations
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and many of the animating diversions he would not have found it in his heart
to have enjoyed. But he studied, pondered, sacrificed and toiled on, and thus
we find the predicate and the ultimate deductive and the legitimate result. For
as in the planetary system myriads of orbs revolve in resplendent order around
one common center, directed in their course by fixed, unalterable laws, so
complicated that the slightest variation on the part of any one body must have
its climax in a “wreck of matter and crush of worlds,” so in human life every
cause produces its legitimate effect, every action or series of actions are fol-
lowed by their legitimate consequence.
Joseph W. Lehr became a student of medicine in 1879, entering the office,
of the late Charles J. Warner, of Congress, a physician of wide practice and
high professional attainments, with whom he remained for four years, gradu-
ating from the medical department of the University of Wooster in 1883. He
began practice at once, opening an office March 1st of this year at Overton.
Here for eight years he remained where his professional ability was recog-
nized in the building up of an encouraging and lucrative practice, but having
determined to locate at the county seat, he removed to Wooster, March 1,
1891. On January 6, 1903, he was married to May C. Newall, of Wooster
township, with whom and in the circle of his home there is serenity and pleas-
ure of domestic enjoyment.
The Doctor has reached the top of the hill of life, but instead of it being
studded with peaks and spurs and crags, it is a plateau, from which he can sur-
vey the vanished eighteen thousand yesterdays and look up, and forward, and
on, to that many more useful and compensating tomorrows.
Doctor Lehr was not born with the imaginative “spoon in his mouth*’
nor a Sir or Don prefix to his name, nor any hope for peerage. He stands
not on what he borrows from his ancestors, but knows that he must work out
his own name and honor. He cares nothing for display, pretense, nor osten-
tation, but for the solid virtues, the excellence and the genuiness of man and
things. Self made, he is responsible for this. He has now attained his
zenith, is in the full strong prime of life, the descendant of a stanch and rug-
ged German ancestry, with the Teutonic enthusiasm in his blood and the loy-
alty to friends and country of the old Prussian and Hohenzollern of the
Fatherland. He is five feet ten inches in height, straight as the mast on a
frigate, with dark hair and eyes, a firm and well rounded neck, admirably ad-
justed to a brace of shoulders after the manner of a veritable modern Ajax,
tipping the beam at two hundred thirty pounds, active, muscular, — in short,
the picture of health, a model in physical outline, in facial assertiveness, force,
will and expression as one who had obeyed the Scriptural command, “Physi-
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cian, know thyself/’ standing four square to the winds, and sound as the pillars
of the Sistine Chapel of Rome. He sprung from the commonality. He has
fashioned his nature on moral and intellectual worth, personal qualities and not
personal possessions. He fixes a high value on his professional honor, upon
his self-respect, his intrinsic value, not so much of it only as can be seen by
others, but as he sees it by his introspection. He discovered himself and can-
not run away with himself. The world at best is but a sort of a big university
and he is still a learner and student in it, in which he is constantly gathering
thoughts, sending them abroad with his eyes, his brains traveling with his
feet. He is a man inhabited by kindly dispositions and a gentleman in and
out of his profession. Courtesy and affability can be no more severed from
him than life from his soul, not out of a base and servile popularity and desire
of ambitious insinuation, but of a native gentleness of disposition and true
value of himself. His individuality is strongly marked, with the healthy
geniality of a large-shouldered man combined with it. He is possessed of an
acute sense of humor, quick in repartee and, seing the point, has a story to tell
— the latest one. that he renders in idiomatic English, that he heard or saw in
some newspaper or magazine. He is a fluent talker, a good conversationalist,
fond of open debate and wields a sledge hammer in public discussions. He
has an innate passion for the woods, hills, the gorges and streams and all the
beautiful wild offerings of nature. The country affords to him its free sports
and amusements; its wider range of rambles or, better still, for both physical
and mental training, it gives him opportunity to employ spare hours of labor
and attention to his farm, as the chances are, if he had not been a doctor he
would have been a farmer. It was the original and divinely appointed calling
of man God planted in Eden, and made it man’s first duty to '‘dress and keep
it." When driven from Eden it was still his mission “to till the ground from
which he was taken." and to “eat bread in the sweat of his face." As said,
he is now at the zenith of his power, alert, energetic, practical, scientific and
remarkably successful in the extension and expanding practice of his profes-
sion. Stout, active and muscular, an actor and athlete, a devotee at the shrine
of baseball, a firm believer in physical recreation and the stimulating, health-
giving and invigorating results of the college gymnasium. He is public
spirited and projective, wants good school houses, more schools, academies,
universities, etc., and the standard of education raised from high to higher,
“in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.” If in the skirmish
with disease or the clenched battle with death he is repulsed or vanquished, he
moves on with a steady step, his sanguine temperament impels him to a more
vigilant quest for the better and best protection and defense against the Mer-
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curys that stand and point at the door of death. Victory doesn’t always perch
on the banners of the great physician, but he enjoys a noble recompense, the
loyal hosannas of the myriads he has rescued from the fateful jaws of dis-
ease. He looks down the vistas with a justifying hope, for on the ruins of
today are built the temples of tomorrow. According to the legend of Virgil
when Troy fell, its banished citizens reared a mightier city on the Tiber.
— By Ben Douglas.
JOHN SNODGRASS CASKEY.
Among the well-remembered, successful and highly honored citizens of
Wayne county of the past generation, few left the impress of their personality
any deeper upon the minds of those with whom they came in contact than
the late John Snodgrass Caskey, a man whom everybody respected for his
public spirit, his high sense of honor and his genial disposition, a man who
possessed talents of such unusual magnitude that he succeeded in various
lines of endeavor, a learned, accomplished and right-thinking man whose in-
fluence, which was always salutary, continued to pervade the lives of his many
friends long after he had closed his eyes on earthly scenes, and which influ-
ence will continue to brighten the pathways of many for all time to come.
Mr. Caskey was born in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, in the year
1838, the son of Robert and Nancy Caskey, prosperous farmers of that
county, owning a large tract of land, and who were highly respected people,
plain and industrious. Mr. Caskey received a good education in the common
schools of his native county. He was an ambitious lad and studied hard, in
fact, he was a student all his life. He took up the study of homeopathy,
received his diploma and for a time practiced very successfully in Ashland
county. But, tiring of this line of endeavor, he came to Wayne county. Ohio,
and began farming. Discontinuing this in a short time, he engaged in the
ice business, then purchased of a Mr. Harris his share in a grocery store, the
firm being known as McClarran & Harris. He proved himself to be a
business man of unusual ability. But he had always been interested in
politics and now gave considerable attention to the same. In the year 1880
he was elected treasurer of Wayne county by the Democrats, served two
terms of two years each, and for a period of four years he discharged the
duties of the same in a very satisfactory manner to all concerned. In the
meantime he had maintained his grocery business, which he continued to
conduct four years after retiring from the treasurers office. Then he dis-
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solved partnership with McClarran, having become well fixed financially.
He moved into his own building and opened an extensive grocery store, which
he continued to conduct with his usual success until 1902, when he sold
out to Berry & Fletcher.
Mr. Caskey was married on October 1, i860, to Josephine Newman, a
lady of refinement and esthetic tastes, the daughter of William and Maria
(Ewing) Newman, of Ashland county, Ohio, where the family has long
been well established and highly respected, her father having been a well-
known physician at Mt. Vernon, Ohio. He was born in Ashland county,
this state. No children were born of this union.
Mr. Caskey was a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows,
the Knights of Pythias and the Masons. He was called to his reward
on June 5, 1903, at the age of sixty-five years. He is remembered as a
genial, honest and progressive citizen.
JOHN F. HARRISON.
Another of the native sons of the Buckeye state who has here passed
his entire life and by his energy, integrity and progressive business methods
attained a high degree of success, is John F. Harrison, fanner, lumberman
and public official. He is a representative of one of the pioneer families of the
state, since his paternal grandfather located in Ohio over ninety years ago,
and that he has attained his prosperity by worthy means is evident from the
unqualified esteem in which he is held in the community where his life has
been passed.
The Harrison family is one of the oldest in Franklin township, Wayne
county, and is of English antecedents. The first of the name left England
about two years after the death of Oliver Cromwell, the Great Protector.
They were Protestants in religious faith and because of the constant fight be-
tween the factions they decided to go to a land where they might worship un-
disturbed according to the dictates of their conscience. They settled near
Frederickstown. Maryland. The subject’s grandfather, John Harrison, who
was a Quaker, was born August t. 1796, near Uniontown, Favette county.
Pennsylvania. He was a very generous and benevolent man and is said to
have never turned a tramp away from his door hungry, and. what is more re-
markable. he reserved a room in his house for the accommodation of tramps
( 40)
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who happen his way at nightfall. John Harrison removed to Cadiz, Harrison
county, Ohio, in 1816, subsequently coming to Wayne county. He was a
successful farmer, and was also a lime-burner, which in those days was an
appreciated industry. He was the father of twelve children. He was twice
married, having eleven children by his first wife and one by the last. He died
in October, 1889, in the ninety-fourth year of his age.
The subject's father was Stephen Harrison, who was born in Franklin
township, Wayne county, and who during his life followed the pursuit of agri-
culture. His death occurred June 21, 1888. His wife bore the maiden name
of Celestia J. Firestone. She was born at Fredericksburg, this county, her
family having come to this state from Maryland in about 1832. Grandfather
Firestone, who died in 1887, was in early life a wagonmaker, and in later life
a farmer. To Stephen and Celestia Harrison were born three children,
namely: Zella M., who is the wife of James Leeper and lives in the state of
Idaho; John F. is the immediate subject of this sketch; Annetta B. is the wife
of Joseph J. Taylor, of Franklin township, Wayne county.
John F. Harrison was born on the 14th day of September, 1865, on the
paternal homestead in Franklin township, this county, and has lived there all
his life up to about five years ago, when he removed to Wooster to be in
closer touch with business and official interests. He received a fair education
in the schools of his township and was reared to the life of a farmer. In
1890 he began farming on his own account, and also went into the sawmill
and lumber business, in which he has been successful. He has sawed much
lumber for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company, besides doing a large gen-
eral business. The Harrison lumber yard, located at an eligible site near the
B. & O. depot, Wooster, has for a number of years enjoyed its full share
of the public patronage and is considered one of the leading business enter-
prises of the city. Mr. Harrison owns the old family homestead in Franklin
township, and expects to move back to it at the close of his official term. He
also has other business interests.
In November, 1901, Mr. Harrison was elected to the office of county com-
missioner, on the Republican ticket, and in 1904 he was re-elected to the same
office. In view of the fact that Wayne county is normally Democratic, and
that this was the first instance in which a Republican had ever been re-elected
to the office of county commissioner, it was a high testimonial to the enviable
standing of Mr. Harrison in the opinion of the voters of the county. As
commissioner, Mr. Harrison was largely instrumental in breaking up what was
known as the “bridge graft." which had become so notorious in many Ohio
counties. Mr. Harrison inaugurated the inquiry which exposed the whole
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scheme and after his success in ousting the graft gang other counties in the
state took the matter up and were also successful in accomplishing the same re-
sult. The result was a vast saving to the public treasury and better results
in the way of construction work. For his accomplishment in this line alone,
Mr. Harrison won the thanks and appreciation of the tax-payers of the county.
Mr. Harrison has always taken a deep and commendable interest in public
matters and had previously served in Franklin township as school director and
supervisor, giving efficient and appreciated service.
On January 18, 1893, Mr. Harrison was united in marriage to Ella Force,
the daughter of Palmer Force, of Franklin township, and this union has been
blessed in the birth of three children, namely: Russell L., bom September 2,
1894; Hazel L., born April 4, 1898, and Irene Adell, bom August 23, 1905.
In his fraternal relations Mr. Harrison is a member of the Free and Accepted
Masons and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. In religion he is, with
his wife, a Presbyterian and both are members of the church of that denomina-
tion at Fredericksburg. They give a generous support to the various activities
of the church and in every walk of life are to be found on the right side of
movements for the betterment of the community. Possessing many fine traits
of character and being of a genial disposition, Mr. Harrison makes friends of
all whom he meets and he is eminently deserving of representation in a work
of this character.
JOHN BUNYAN NOLIN.
Among the most highly regarded citizens of Wayne county, Ohio, is John
B. Nolin, who has resided here since about 1874, having been previously en-
gaged mainly in agricultural pursuits. He is now conducting one of the lead-
ing livery stables in this city, in connection with which he runs an automobile
garage, complete in every detail and an enterprise highly appreciated here by
the owners of machines.
Mr. Nolin is a native son of the Keystone state, having been bom at
Allegheny, on November 16, 1849. His father was John Nolin, who was
born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His mother died when he was an infant
and soon afterwards the family became separated and drifted apart, losing
track of each other. John Nolin became a farmer on reaching mature years
and in 1874 left Pennsylvania and located about seven miles northwest of
Wooster. Wayne county, where he lived until his death, which occurred on
September 27, 1885, aged seventy years. He was married to Sarah Ann Long,
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who was also born in Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, and who died on De-
cember 27, 1890, at the age of seventy-four years. Their union wras blessed
in the birth of five children, as follows: David, deceased; Arthur Morrow,
who resides near Pittsburg, Pennsylvania; Catherine, deceased; Theodore Ad-
dison of Greeley, Colorado; and John B., the subject.
John B. Nolin spent his early years under the parental roof and w as reared
to the life of a farmer. He attended the common schools and secured a fair
education. Upon attaining maturity he continued his farming operations,
with which he combined threshing in season and general teaming. He was
fairly successful in his affairs, but in about 1894 he removed to Wooster and
went on the road as a salesman for agricultural and coal-mining machinery.
He w’as a good salesman and continued in this line for four years. Tiring
then of the road, which compelled him to remain away from home the greater
part of the time, he relinquished that work and, in 1901, went into the general
livery business in Wooster, in which line he has been successful to a very
gratifying degree. His stable is large and well arranged for the accommoda-
tion of his own and transient stock and his vehicles are not only varied in char-
acter, but in style are the equal of anything in the county. Mr. Nolin is ac-
commodating and obliging in serving the public and he has been favored writh
a liberal share of the public patronage. In addition to his livery business, Mr.
Nolin has also established an automobile garage department, which met a
long-felt want here, and this too has been given satisfactory encouragement
by the owners of machines who prefer to have their property taken care of by
some one who will look after the machines properly.
In 1874 Mr. Nolin took unto himself a wife in the person of Susan Mc-
Roberts, also a native of Pennsylvania, born near Pittsburgh. This union
lias been a happy one and has been sealed by the birth of three children, all
sons, as follows: Clarence, who is interested in the liverv business with his
father; Edward J., who is engaged in the drug business at Mansfield, Ohio,
and Wiley M., who is a barber at Zanesville, this state. Fraternally, Mr.
Nolin is a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellow s, the principles
of which order meet with a daily exemplification in the subject's life. In poli-
tics he is stanch Republican, giving the party a warm and enthusiastic support.
Religiously Mr. and Mrs. Nolin are active members of the First Presbyterian
church of Wooster and give a generous support to the varied interests of the
society. Viewed in a personal light, Mr. Nolin is a strong man. His business
interests have claimed much of his attention, yet he has ever found time to
faithfully discharge the duties of citizenship and promote public progress
through active co-operation in all measures for the general good.
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HENRY MILTON KNEPP.
Back to stanch old German stock does Mr. Knepp trace his lineage, and
that in his character abide those sterling qualities which have ever marked the
true type of the German nation, is manifest when we come to consider the
more salient points in his life history, which has been marked by consecutive
industry and invincible spirit, eventuating most naturally in securing for him
a high position in the respect and confidence of his fellowmen. He has passed
practically his entire life in Wayne county, where his father was one of the
early pioneer settlers, contributing his quota to its development and prosperity,
even as his son has endorsed and supported every movement looking to the bet-
terment and advancement of the community’s best interests.
Henry M. Knepp was born in East Union township, Wayne county, Ohio,
on the 13th of October, 1859, and is a son of William and Leah (Myers)
Knepp. The father was a native of Snyder county, Pennsylvania, and came
to Ohio in young manhood, settling at Orrville, Wayne county. At that time
there was but one house at Orrville. Mr. Knepp has always been a farmer by
vocation and is now living in retirement at Jackson, this county. The sub-
ject’s mother was born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, and in 1837 came
to Ohio, the trip overland being made in a “prairie schooner,” a common mode
of travel in that early day. Her death occurred at Jackson, this county, on
August 19, 1879. She bore her husband four children, briefly mentioned as
follows: Henry M., the first born, is the immediate subject of this sketch;
Margaret is the wife of J. S. Jamison, of Creston, this county; Samuel A. and
Frank also live at Creston, both being married.
Henry M. Knepp remained under the parental roof until he was twenty-
two years old and received a good education in the common schools of Canaan
township. He supplemented this education by attendance at the Smithville
Academy, after which he engaged in teaching school, being employed for
twelve consecutive terms in this county. He then accepted a position as in-
structor in the Spirit Lake Normal Academy, at Spirit Lake, Iowa, and was
so engaged when his wife died. He then relinquished the pedagogic profes-
sion and returned home. He took up surveying and civil engineering and in
June, 1885, he graduated in the course of civil engineering at the Ada (Ohio)
Normal LTniversity. He engaged in the active practice of his profession, in
which he met with distinctive success, and in 1901 he was placed on the Demo-
cratic ticket for county surveyor, having no opposition for the place. He was
elected and took office the following year. In 1904 he was re-elected and so
impressed were the people as to his fitness for the office that no one was placed
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630
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
in nomination to oppose him and he was re-elected. He was again elected to
the office in 1908, and in thus serving his third term, certainly a marked testi-
monial to his technical ability and his popularity as a man. He had previous-
ly served four years as assessor of Canaan township. He is the owner of
property at Wooster and Creston. In every sphere of activity to which he has
lent his energy, Mr. Knepp has achieved a distinctive success and has won an
enviable place in the esteem of the people, most of whom have known him all
his life.
In 1887 Mr. Knepp was united in marriage to Emma Johnson, of Canaan
township, but their wedded life was of short duration, her death occurring the
following year. In 1891 he married Della Fetzer, a daughter of Peter Fetzer,
of Canaan township, and to them have been born two children, daughters,
namely, Beulah, who is seventeen years old, and Ruth, who is fifteen.
ALBERT S. SAURER.
Notwithstanding the fact that the republic of Switzerland is one of the
smallest countries of the world, it has sent a large number of emigrants to
the United States during the years that have elapsed since our independence
was secured. The people of that country, appreciating the blessings of liberty,
of which they had a strong example in their own land, were not slow to recog-
nize the possibilities that opened out in splendid perspective before all who lo-
cated in this country. Accordingly, ever since the close of the Revolutionary
war, large numbers of the hardy Swiss have crossed the Atlantic and sought
homes in the United States. And here their descendants have become among
the most intelligent, patriotic, industrious and upright of our great and won-
derful cosmopolitan population. The subject of this sketch is descended from
Swiss ancestors, his grandfather. John Saurer, having been a native of that
country. He came to America when a young man and in about 1824 settled
in Wayne county. His son, the subject’s father, was Simon S. Saurer, who
was born in this county and lived here all his life, his death occurring in 1902,
at the age of sixtv-six years. He was a blacksmith by trade and also followed
farming, being successful in both callings. He was a man who enjoyed the
respect of all who knew him, being possessed of those sterling qualities of
character which commend a man to the consideration of his fellows. He mar-
ried Mary Ann Tschantz, who was born and reared in Paint township, Wayne
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63I
county. She is now living near Maysville, Salt Creek township. To this
union were born the following children: Elizabeth, the wife of Adam Hoff-
man, of Sugarcreek township: Philip S., a hardware merchant at Barberton,
Ohio; Emanuel, a manufacturer and one of the proprietors of the Maysville
Tile Works, at Maysville, this county: Fannie is the wife of Constant Hoff-
man, of Sugarcreek township; Benjamin, of Saltcreek township; Peter, of
Sugarcreek township; Edward, of Holmes county, this state; Albert S., the
immediate subject of this review, and Alfred, of Saltcreek township.
Albert S. Saurer was born in Sugarcreek township, Wayne county, Ohio,
on May 16, 1871, and was reared on the home farm until he was fourteen
years old, in the meanwhile receiving such education as was afforded in the
public schools of the township. This education he afterwards supplemented
by attendance at the Bixler Business College, at Wooster, where he was gradu-
ated. At the age of fourteen years, Mr. Saurer went to Rittman and entered
the employ of his brother in the hardware business, with whom he remained
four years. His brother was postmaster and during this period the subject
served as assistant postmaster, this being during President Cleveland's first ad-
ministration. He then worked about a year for Landes Brothers at Rittman,
and then returned to the home farm, where he remained for awhile. In 1891
Mr. Saurer came to Wooster and accepted employment with Harding & Com-
pany, hardware dealers, with whom he remained for thirteen years. He was
then for a short time with the Canton Hardware Company, at Canton, Ohio,
after which he returned to Wooster and for about two and a half years was
associated with the Wooster Hardware Company. In 1905 Mr. Saurer was
placed on the Democratic ticket for the office of county recorder and was sub-
sequently elected, assuming the duties of his office in September, 1906. So
satisfactory were his services to the county in that capacity that in 1908 he was
re-elected and is now serving his second term. He is a careful and painstaking
official and in the discharge of his public duties he exercises the same care that
he would in his own private business affairs. Since entering the office Mr.
Saurer has purchased the interest of A. F. Cooley in the Wooster Hardware
Company, and is thus interested at this time.
On the 4th of April, 1894, Mr. Saurer was united in marriage to Sue M.
Dull, a daughter of Daniel Dull, of Wooster, and born in Wayne township in
1871. They are the parents of three children, whose names and date of birth
are as follows: Amy E., February 26, 1896; Robert D., April 20, 1899; Ruth
L.. August 2, 190T.
In politics Mr. Saurer has ever maintained a stanch allegiance to the
Democratic party and has been active in its support. Fraternally he belongs
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
632
to Lodge Xo. 42, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, at Wooster, and is also
a member of the Royal Arcanum and the Junior Order of United American
Mechanics. He is also a member of the Wooster Board of Trade. Mr.
Saurer has had a deep interest in fancy poultry, of which he has a number of
fine specimens, and has evinced an interest by his membership in Wooster
Poultry Association, of which he is the present secretary and treasurer. This
association is a live organization and is doing much to advance the standard
of poultry in this section. In religion Mr. and Mrs. Saurer are faithful mem-
bers of the English Reformed church at Wooster, to which they give a gener-
ous support. Mr. Saurer is a man of many splendid qualifications and he has
won and retains a host of warm personal friends throughout the county.
JAMES B. MEECH.
James B. Meech has long been an important factor in professional cir-
cles of Wayne county, Ohio, and his popularity as an attorney is well de-
served. as in him are embraced the characteristics of an unbending integrity,
unabated energy and industry. He is public-spirited and takes a deep interest
in whatever tends to promote the intellectual, civic and material welfare of
the community in which he has so long resided, — in fact, where his life has
been spent, for he was horn in Chippewa township, October 7, 1853, the son
of George and Martha (Housel) Meech, the latter a native of Summit
county, this state, first seeing the light of day in the city of Akron. James
B. Meech’s paternal grandparents. Abel and Katherine Meech, were sturdy
Xew Englanders, coming to Ohio in a very early day and locating in Chip-
pewa township: they took up government land which they developed into a
good farm and spent the remaining years of their lives here. Thus the
name Meech has been a familiar one in this section of Wayne county since
the days of the forest primeval. The maternal grandparents of Mr. Meech
were Hiram and Sarah Housel. residents of Summit county back in the
times of the first settlers.
George Meech. father of James B., was probably born in New England
in 1827. and Martha Housel, his wife, was born in Summit county. Ohio,
in 1832. They met and married in the last-named county and there became
prosperous fanners and stock dealers. Both died in 1858. leaving four
daughters and one son. lames B.. of this review. George Meech was a
stanch W hig, later a Republican.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
633
James B. Meech was a studious lad and he made a good record in
the common schools of his native community. Later he took a course in
Dennison University, leaving that institution in his sophomore year, 1875.
He then gave way to a desire of long standing to begin the study of law in
the office of R. B. Young at Doylestown, and later with Judge Joseph Down-
ing of Wooster. He made rapid progress and was admitted to the bar in
1877 ar|d immediately took up practice in Doylestown and has been here
ever since. He was successful from the first and now he has a clientele
second to none, enjoying a lucrative practice in the local courts, all his time
being taken with his legal affairs. He is a convincing speaker before a jury
and his knowledge of jurisprudence and all phases of the law is profound.
Mr. Meech was married December 20. 1882, to Etta Franks, daughter
of Lyman and Elizabeth Franks, mentioned at length in another part of this
work. To Mr. and Mrs. Meech two children have been born, Bessie B., a
teacher in the public schools at Akron. Ohio, and Mildred, deceased.
Politically, Mr. Meech is a loyal Republican and he has taken consid-
erable interest in local party affairs, having held many local offices, and in
1891 made the race for prosecuting attorney of Wayne county. Fraternally,
he is a member of the Knights of Pythias.
Mr. Meech does an extensive business as the representative of the Home
Insurance Company of Xew York, also the Pennsylvania Fire Insurance
Company and the Insurance Company of North America. He is well known
throughout the county and is popular with all classes and he and his wife
mingle with the best society of the county and township.
PROF. OHIO M. YOCUM.
Educator, local manager and joint proprietor of the Yocums-Bixler Busi-
ness College, one of the leading institutions of the kind in the state of Ohio,
the subject of this sketch is a native of Missouri, born in the town of Warren-
ton on May 30. 1877. His father. James E. Yocum, whose birth occurred in
Cumberland county. Pennsylvania, in 1826. was brought to Wayne county by
his parents when two years old and lived here until 1865, when he moved to
Warrenton, Missouri, near which place he has since resided, following the oc-
cupation of farming. In 1849, while living in W ayne county, he joined a com-
pany of men as adventurous and daring as himself and crossed the plains to
seek his fortune in the gold fields of California, but after spending three years
in that far-off region, returned home where he continued to reside until his
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634
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
removal west, as stated above. He served in the One Hundred Sixty-ninth
Regiment Ohio Infantry during the Civil war, took part in a number of cam-
paigns and battles and earned a creditable record as a soldier. At the ad-
vanced age of eighty-three years, he is still quite well preserved, retaining the
possession of most of his faculties, both physical and mental, and keeping in
close touch with current events and the leading public questions of the times.
Prior to her marriage Mrs. James E. Yocum bore the name of Adelaide Mun-
hall; she is a native of Ohio and still living, having borne her husband children
as follows : Morris, deceased ; Mrs. Ida T. Shelton, of Warrenton, Missouri :
Emmerson J., deceased; Wade, who lives in Warrenton, as does Eva Beall
Yocum, who is unmarried; Mrs. Mary M. Miller, the sixth in order of birth,
resides at Jonesburg, Missouri; Howard lives in Warrenton; Dr. Lincoln A.
Yocum, a sketch of whom appears elsewhere in these pages, is a well known
physician and surgeon of Wooster, Ohio; Mrs. May Godfrey, of Carroll, Iowa,
is the ninth in number; Horace, of Massillon, Ohio, and Charles, of Warren-
ton, Missouri, the tenth and eleventh respectively, the youngest member of the
family being Prof. Ohio M., whose name heads the article.
Ohio M. Yocum, who, as already stated, is a native of Missouri, spent his
childhood and youth at the paternal home near Warrenton and early became
familiar with the varied duties which fall to the lot of country lads. When
old enough to be of service he bore his part in the cultivation of the farm and
when not thus engaged pursued his studies in the country school near his home,
where in due time he fitted himself for more advanced work in the Central
Wesleyan College of Warrenton. After finishing the curriculum of that insti-
tution, he entered the business college at Massillon, Ohio, where he took a full
course in commercial work and was graduated, following which he accepted a
position in the same institution, which he filled with credit for a period of one
year. Professor Yocum's rise in the line of commercial education was rapid
and commendable and in 1901, when but twenty-three years old, he took upon
himself the local management ofithe Yocums-Bixler Business College, of which
he and his brother, H. G. Yocum, became proprietors that year and with which
both have since been identified, the latter assuming general management of the
enterprise. The Yocums-Bixler Business College was established in 1888
by Prof. Gideon Bixler, who began work with a class of penmanship, the suc-
cess of which soon induced him to add the various branches of a commercial
course and enlarge his facilities for the proper accommodation of pupils re-
quiring his services. A reorganization was effected in 1891. since which date
the number of students has steadily increased until there is now an average at-
tendance of about one hundred and fifty with four teachers selected with refer-
ence to efficiency and skill in their respective departments.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
635
Since the school came under the management of the Yocum brothers its
success has been such as to lead them to establish similar institutions in various
other cities, and at this time they have a chain of schools in the following
places : Massillon, Mansfield, Findlay, Uhrichsville and New Philadelphia, all
growing out of the original establishment at Massillon and Wooster, which
continues to be the headquarters of the proprietors.
Professor Yocum is an educator of wide and honorable reputation in his
line of work and the school of which he is the executive head is one of the best
known institutions of the kind in the state. He possesses executive ability of
a high order, also a thorough knowledge of the various courses of his school.
Young and energetic, he has made his influence a power for good in the busi-
ness world and his presence a blessing to the hundreds of young men and
women with whom he is constantly brought into contact.
Professor Yocum was married in June, 1903, to Grace Jeanette Yoder,
of Wooster, the union being blessed with one child, a daughter, Dorothy Ade-
laide, who was born on the 25th day of September, 1904. Professor and Mrs.
Yocum are esteemed members of the First Presbyterian church of Wooster
and stand high in the general esteem of the people of the city. They are popu-
lar in the social life of the community, take an active interest in all that tends
to the moral advancement of their kind and fill a large place in the public gaze
by reason of their prominence in religious and intellectual work.
The Yocums-Bixler Colleges, to which passing reference is made in a pre-
ceding paragraph, yield precedence to no other institution of the kind in the
United States, the course of study being as complete as that of more preten-
tious schools and the methods of instruction in the hands of thoroughly trained
specialists second to none. The commercial course includes bookkeeping,
business arithmetic, penmanship, commercial law. correspondence, corporation
and voucher accounting, rapid calculation, spelling, commercial literature and
business practice. There is also a shorthand and typewriting course. To ac-
commodate many students who otherwise could not avail themselves of the
splendid opportunity for a business training which the school affords, a night
course, including all the branches of the curriculum, has been established and
is now a highly prized feature of the institution.
WELKER G. CHRISTY.
The popular citizen and enterprising business man whose name fur-
nishes the heading of this review needs no formal introduction to the people
of Wooster and Wayne county. Identified with the commercial interests of
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636
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
the city and taking an active part in promoting the material advancement of
the community, he has forged rapidly to the front in business circles, besides
earning an honorable reputation as one of the county’s progressive men of
affairs. Welker G. Christy is a worthy descendant of an old and respected
family that had its origin in Ireland, of which country his great-grandfather,
James Christy, was a native. This ancestor came to America many years ago
and is supposed to have settled in Pennsylvania where his son, Robert. Christy,
the subject's grandfather, was born and reared. Robert Christy grew to man-
hood in his native commonwealth and in the prime of life migrated to Wayne
county, Ohio, where he followed fanning and milling and where he spent the
remainder of his days, dying sometime in the eighties, at the age of seventy-
two years.
James W. Christy, father of the subject, was born in the county of Wayne
and is still a citizen of the same, residing at this time in a beautiful home a
short distance north of Wooster and devoting his attention to agricultural
pursuits. For a number of years he carried on a successful lumber business
at the county seat, but after accumulating a comfortable competency retired to
the country where he is now enjoying some of the blessings earned during his
active business career. He served in the One Hundred Twentieth Regiment
Ohio Infantry during the late Civil war and participated in many of the blood-
iest battles of that historic struggle, in one of which he received a slight though
painful wound. He was over three years at the front, during which time
he discharged his duties faithfully and courageously and at the expiration of
his term of service retired from the army with an honorable record as a brave
and gallant soldier.
In his young manhood James W. Christy married Mary Troutman, of
Wayne county, who is still living, the union resulting in the birth of two
children, viz: Mrs. A. W. Smvser. of Overton. Ohio, and Welker G.. of this
sketch.
Welker G. Christy, to a brief review of whose career the following lines
are devoted, is a native of Wayne county, Ohio, and dates his birth from the
jgth of December, 1874. His early life, devoid of any incident or event of
especial interest and pretty much like that of the majority of lads, was spent
under the parental roof, where he received the training and bent of mind which
in due time led him to plan for the future so as to become more than a mere
passive agent in the affairs of men. After completing the common school
course, he attended for some time the Northern Ohio University at Ada, fol-
lowing which he remained two years at home assisting his father in the culti-
vating of the farm. Possessing a practical mind and manifesting while still a
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WAYNE COUNTY. OHIO.
637
mere lad a decided preference for business pursuits, he bent all his energies in
the direction of the world of trade, fully determined to carry out his well de-
fined purposes and achieve success in the calling which he should select. With
this object in view, he left home in the year 1900 and entered the Wooster
Hardware Company as an employe for a period of three years, during which
time he not only became familiar with every detail of the business, but also ac-
quired a practical knowledge of the basic principles upon which the world of
trade is founded.
By diligence and faithfulness Mr. Christy won the confidence of his em-
ployers and at the expiration of the time indicated he purchased the interest
of I. N. McKinney and became one of the proprietors. Since 1903 he has de-
voted his attention very closely to the interests of the firm and to him belongs
not a little of the credit of building up and greatly extending the business until
the establishment is now the largest and most successful af the kind in the city
and one of the best known in the northern part of the state. Mr. Christy is a
clear-headed, far-seeing business man whose methods have ever been progres-
sive and successful and whose name stands for fair and honorable dealing in
all the terms imply. Although younger than the majority of his contempor-
aries in Wooster, he has won distinctive prestige in commercial circles and by
adhering to the straightforward course he has heretofore pursued he bids fair
to fill a still larger and more conspicuous place in the business world as the
years go by. With a clear-cut, eminently sane and practical character and a
forceful, attractive personality, he has come to the front in other than his own
business interests, being a director of the Citizens National Bank of Wooster,
besides giving a free and generous support to all enterprises having for their
object the advancement of the city along material lines.
Mr. Christy is a Republican in politics and as a member of the county
executive committee he has rendered his party valuable service by his judicious
counsel and effective campaign work. Although a recognized leader and
ready at all times to make sacrifice for the good of the party, he is not an office
seeker nor aspirant for any kind of public renown, preferring the plain, satis-
factory life which he now leads and the simple title of citizen to any honors
or emoluments within the gift of his fellowmen. His fraternal relations are
represented by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and its various branches,
in all of which he has been honored from time to time with important official
positions. As a member of the First Presbyterian church of Wooster his life
has been influential for good and the doctrines and teachings to which he yields
assent he endeavors to exemplify in his relations with his fellow men.
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638
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Mr. Christy has never assumed the duties or responsibilities of the mar-
riage relation and his present manner of living is becoming his position and
high social standing in the community. All of his business life has been spent
in Wooster, and his personal history presents no pages blotted by unworthy
or dishonorable conduct. Few men are as well and favorably known, and none
enjoy higher standing as a generous, obliging, large-hearted friend. His hand
is ever open to accommodate the poor and needy, no worthy object appeals to
him in vain and his popularity is only limited by the bounds of his acquaintance.
CHRISTOPHER JOHN HARROLD.
Among those whose lives and labors have conferred honor and distinc-
tion upon the county of Wayne and its beautiful and prosperous seat of jus-
tice, is the well-known gentleman whose name appears above and who, as
custodian of one of the people’s most important official trusts, fills a large
place in the public life of Wayne county. C. J. Harrold, clerk of the Wayne
county courts, is a native of Ohio, born two miles east of West Lebanon
in Stark county on the 17th day of March, 1859. The family to which he
belongs is a very old and historic one, it being a matter of record that
the name was derived from Harold, the last of the Saxon kings of England,
to whom, according to well authenticated data, the subject’s antecedents are
directly traceable.
When the Harrolds first came to America is not known, but it is sup-
posed to have been at quite a remote date as the name was well known in
Pennsylvania many years ago, especially in Lancaster county, where the sub-
ject’s grandfather, Christopher, was born and reared. Later he moved to
Stark county, Ohio, where he spent the remainder of his days and where his
son Wesley, who was six months old when his parents left their native state,
grew to maturity.
Wesley Harrold was reared on the paternal homestead near the division
line between the counties of Stark and Wayne and on reaching manhood’s
estate engaged in farming, which he followed until his death, at the age of
sixty-one years. When a young man he married Magdalena Mottinger, whose
father came from Germany in an early day and settled near a small village
in Summit county by the name of Inland, where he became a successful tiller
of the soil and where Mrs. Harrold was born. She died at the age of fiftv-
seven, after bearing her husband seven children, whose names are as follows :
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639
Mrs. Parmelia Baughman, of Navarre, Stark county; Mrs. Lucy Oberlin,
of Massillon; Mrs. Clara Wertz, who lives in the city of Akron; Manias C.,
deceased; William A., whose home is in Massillon, and Arthur S. O., of
Navarre; the subject of this sketch is the second in order of birth.
Christopher J. Harrold was reared on the family homestead in Stark
county and grew to the full stature of well-developed manhood with a proper
conception of the d'gnity of life and the duties and responsibilities which it
entails. When old enough to be of service he became familiar with the rugged
duties of the farm, and in the district school hard by which he attended dur-
ing the winter months laid the foundation of mental discipline which subse-
quently made h:m a well educated and widely informed young man. On fin-
ishing the common school branches he entered, in 1877, Heidelberg Univer-
sity at Tiffin, where he pursued his studies for a period of five years and then
took a business course in Duff's Commercial College at Pittsburg, Pennsyl-
vania, from which he Was graduated with an honorable record as an indus-
trious and enterprising student. After completing his training in the latter
institution, Mr.Harrold engaged in the nursery business at Dalton, Wayne
county, where he continued with gratifying success from 1882 till 1905, when
he disposed of the business to enter upon his duties as clerk of Wayne county
courts, a position to which he was elected the preceding year. Mr. Harrold
began taking an interest in public matters at quite an early age and in due
time became an influential factor in local politics and a leader of the Demo-
cratic party in his community. An active worker and a judicious adviser in
party councils, he rendered valuable service in a number of campaigns and in
1904, when an available candidate Was required for the office of clerk of the
courts, the choice very properly fell to him. In November of that year he
defeated his Republican competitor by a handsome majority and, taking
charge of the office in August, 1905, he has since devoted his attention to the
duties of the same, proving a capable and popular public servant and making
a record above the suspicion of reproach.
Mr. Harrold is distinctively a man of affairs and, as already indicated,
fills a large place in the public life of his city and county and richly merits
the recognition which he has received as an able official and enterprising citi-
zen. He has always stood for progress and improvement and all means and
measures for the material advancement of the community and the social,
intellectual and moral welfare of the populace find in him a zealous and lib-
eral patron. Like the majority of broad-minded, wide-awake men, he believes
in the efficacy of secret fraternal organizations and to this end has become
identified with the Masonic order, in which he has attained to a high standing,
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belonging to Ebenezer Lodge in Wooster, also to the commandery, chapter
and council, taking the thirty-second degree in Cleveland in the year 1909.
He is also an enthusiastic member of the Knights of Pythias order in Wooster
and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows at Dalton, besides being an active
and influential member of the encampment, in which, as in the subordinate
lodge, he has been honored with important official positions from time to
time.
Mr. Harrold, on December 28, 1882, was happily married to Emma M.
Wertz, of Dalton, Ohio, daughter of W. H. H. and Carrie V. Wertz, a pe-
culiar coincidence being the marriage of his two sisters at the same time.
Mr. and Mrs. Harrold have two children, the older of whom is now Mrs.
Carrie L. Shroth, of Columbus. The younger, Mildred, fourteen years of
age, is a student in the city schools. These daughters and their parents are
members of the Lutheran church, all of them taking an active interest in re-
ligious and charitable work and demonstrating by their daily lives the beauty
and worth of the faith to which they hold.
WILLIAM HENRY WORST.
The life history of him whose name heads this sketch is closely identified
with the history of Wayne county, which has been his home for many years.
His life has been one of untiring activity and has been crowned with a high
and well-merited degree of success.
Mr. Worst was born on the 13th day of August, 1859, in Prairie town-
ship, Ashland county. Ohio. -His father, Samuel Worst, was born in the
same locality in 1817, and his death occurred on March 24, 1894. He was
a farmer by vocation and was very successful in his operations, having owned
at the time of his death, besides his home farm of one hundred and thirty-
five acres, two other farms in Ashland county, of fifty-seven and one hun-
dred acres respectively, and a farm of one hundred and twenty-one acres in
Congress township. Wayne county. He was a stanch adherent of the Demo-
cratic party and belonged to the Dunkard church. He was three times
married, first to Mary Martin, who was born in Chester township, Wayne
county. Ohio, and who died in 1868. Subsequently he married Mary Flack-
ler, a native of Richland county, Ohio, and after her death he wedded
Lucy Resecker. of Summit county, this state. Samuel Worst was the father
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of nine children, namely ; John, who died at the age of five years, Elizabeth,
Margaret, Nancy. George, Mary, Samuel, David and William, the subject
of this sketch.
The subject’s paternal grandfather, Henry Worst, was a native of Penn-
sylvania and about 1817 he came to Ohio and entered a tract of government
land in Ashland county. At that time there were but three houses in Wooster
and but one house between that place and his farm. He was a prominent
and progressive man and stood high in the community. He died at the
remarkable age of ninety-four years. The subject’s maternal grandfather
was Rev. John Martin, a well-known minister of the Dunkard church. He
was born in Bedford county, Pennsylvania, and about 1835 came to Wayne
county, settling in Chester township. He was a man of excellent parts and
was highly regarded throughout the community.
William H. Worst remained at borne during the years of his youth
and secured a fair education in the common schools. He assisted his father
in the duties of the farm until he was twenty-one years old, and then for
about a year he was employed at farm labor by the month. He then rented
farms for seven years and was successful in his operations, being enabled
in 1887 to buy a farm of one hundred and one and a half acres in Congress
township. Subsequently he bought a half interest in the old home farm in
Ashland county and has operated both farms with much success. In 1899
he bought a comfortable and attractive home in the village of Pleasant Home
and retired from active farm work, having rented his farms to others, though
he still maintains a general supervision over them. He is not altogether idle,
however, as he gives some attention to the real estate business. He is a man
of good business methods and makes a success of whatever he undertakes.
He possesses a genial disposition and a kindliness of manner which wins
him friends wherever he goes and he is accounted one of the leading citi-
zens of his community.
On the 9th of December, 1884. Mr. Worst wedded Bel via Cline, who
was born in Jackson township, Ashland county. Ohio. September t6. i86r,
the daughter of John and Jane Cline, early settlers in that section. There
was born to this union one son, Guy, born January 17, 1886, and whose
death occurred on October 3, 1886.
In politics Mr. Worst is a stanch Democrat, and has served his fellow-
citizens in several official capacities, having been trustee of Congress town-
ship for six years, a member of the school board for five years and a notarv
public for seven years. Socially, he is a member of the Independent Order
<4')
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of Odd Fellows and the Knights of the Maccabees. He belongs to that
public-spirited, useful type of men whose ambitions and desires are directed
in those channels through which flow the greatest and most permanent good
to the greatest number, and it is therefore consistent with the purpose and
plan of this work that his record be given among those of other representative
citizens of Wayne county.
HORACE NELSON MATEER.
Holding worthy prestige as a scholar, scientist and physician, the sub-
ject of this review has achieved distinction in the various lines of effort to
which he has devoted his talents and as a citizen alive to all that makes for the
progress of his county and state he commands the same high degree of con-
fidence and esteem which characterize his professional status.
Dr. Horace Nelson Mateer is a native of Adams county, Pennsylvania,
and was born December 12, 1855, about eleven miles from Gettysburg, the
scene of one of the greatest and most sanguinary battles of the late Civil war
and one of the few decisive engagements of modern times. The Mateer
family is of Scotch-Irish origin, and the present patronymic is a modification
of the name McTeer, by which the ancestors of the American branch were
originally known. When the Doctor’s antecedents first came to America
can not be ascertained, but it is supposed to have been some time during the
colonial period, as the name was familiar in various parts of the Cumberland
valley as early as the Revolutionary struggle. William Mateer, the Doctor’s
grandfather, was a native of the above valley and a farmer by occupation.
Among his children was a son by the name of John Mateer, whose birth oc-
curred in Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, November 7, 1807, and who
also became a tiller of the soil, first in his native valley and later in fhe county
of Mercer; thence he removed to Illinois, where he spent the remainder of
his days, dying in Monmouth, Illinois, January 29, 1875, at the age of sixty-
seven years.
Mary Nelson Divcn, wife of John Mateer and mother of the subject of
this sketch, was also born and reared in southeastern Pennsylvania, and be-
longed to one of the old and well-known Scotch-Irish families that settled
in the Cumberland valley at a very early period. She survived her husband
about twenty-three years, departing this life in 1898 at the age of seventy-
nine.
John and Mary X. Mateer were the parents of seven children, of whom
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the late Calvin Wilson Mateer, D. D., LL.D., a distinguished minister of
the Presbyterian church and for forty-five years a missionary to the Chinese,
was the oldest. He was born in Pennsylvania, received a collegiate and the-
ological training and after a few years of ministerial labor in his native state
and elsewhere was sent in 1863 as a missionary to China, where he not only
inaugurated important religious work, but founded the Tung Chow College,
one of the principal educational institutions of the Flowery kingdom, which
he served as president, and the success of which was due very largely to his
efforts and judicious management. He became one of the most noted men of
his church in the foreign field and in addition to locating a number of mission
stations and publishing many valuable books on various subjects, served as
chairman of the committee which translated the Bible into the Chinese tongue,
one of the greatest and most important works of the kind ever accomplished
in the domain of scholarship. Doctor Mateer was first married to Julia
Brown, of Delaware county, Ohio, who proved a worthy helpmeet to her dis-
tinguished husband, sharing his labors in the missionary field, encouraging
him in all his efforts to improve the condition of the Chinese and teach them
the way of life and demonstrating her worth in a special manner in looking
after the interests of hundreds of Chinese children, who learned to prize her
as something more than a mother.
Some time after the death of this excellent woman, the Doctor con-
tracted a matrimonial alliance with Ada Haven, of Pekin, China, who sur-
vives him and at present lives in the city of Weishein, where she is engaged
in missionary work. During his forty-five years as a missionary Doctor Ma-
teer revisited his native land but three times, his interest in his labor being
such that he found it difficult to turn it over to others, even for a brief period.
He lived a very active and eminently useful life, accomplished great results
for civilization and the Christian religion and was planning for still more ex-
tensive operations when death called him from his labors in the year 1908. .
William Diven Mateer, the second son, after a long and useful career
as a business man in the state of Illinois, is now living in retirement at Santa
Ana, California. Mrs. Jane Henderson Kirkwood, the third of the family,
is the wido\v of the late Dr. Samuel J. Kirkwood, for many years professor
of mathematics in the University of Wooster and a most highly esteemed
scholar and accomplished gentleman. John Lourie Mateer, the next in order
of birth, went to China a number of years ago as superintendent of the print-
ing establishment of the American board of commissioners for foreign mis-
sions in the city of Pekin. He died there the year before the Boxer uprising
and his loss was greatly deplored by all the foreign contingent in that capital.
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Rev. Robert McCheyne Mateer, a learned Presbyterian divine, located at
Wieshein, China, is the fifth in succession. Since going to the present field
of labor in 1882, he has done much important educational and evangelical
work and is esteemed one of the most successful and judicious missionaries in
the province where he is located. Dr. Horace Nelson Mateer, of this review,
is the sixth in order of birth. The youngest of the family, Mrs. Lillian
Mateer Walker, wife of Rev. William Stokes Walker, is deceased. Both
Rev. and Mrs. Walker went to the Flowery kingdom as missionaries of the
Presbyterian church, but after several years of strenuous work they were
obliged to return home on account of the husband's failing health, arriving
in this country in 1885. Later Mrs. Walker fell a victim to disease con-
tracted while abroad and departed this life in the year 1900. lamented by all
who knew her.
When Horace N. Mateer was about one year old his parents moved from
Cumberland valley to Mercer county, Pennsylvania, and seven years later
they changed their place of abode to Henry. Illinois, where the future physi-
cian and scientist received his preliminary educational discipline. Later he ac-
companied his parents upon their removal to Monmouth, in the same state,
and in due time entered the college in that city, which he attended from 1872
to 1875 inclusive. Shortly after his father’s death he entered the junior class
of Princeton University, New Jersey, completing the prescribed course of
study in that institution and graduating in 1877, ' lls brother Robert receiving
his degree the same year. During the two years following he was principal
of the Laird Institute, a preparatory school at Murraysville, Pennsylvania,
which position he resigned in 1879, to spend a year in post-graduate work at
Princeton.
In the fall of 1880 Doctor Mateer entered the medical department of the
University of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia, where he spent the three years
ensuing in close study and research, making an honorable record as a student
and standing high in the confidence and esteem of his professors and class-
mates. On the completion of his course, in June. 1883, he was graduated with
first honors of his class, in addition to which he also received the Henry C.
Lea prize for the best graduating thesis, both rewards coming to him as a
result of painstaking study and investigation and a laudable ambition to excel
in all of his work. The year following his graduation he was made resident
phvsician and surgeon of the University Hospital in Philadelphia, but after
holding the position for a short time resigned and in April, 1884, located at
Wooster, where he has since been engaged in the practice of his profession
with most signal success.
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In September of the above year Doctor Mateer formed a co-partnership
with Dr. James D. Robison, which lasted very agreeably for three years,
when it was discontinued by reason of Dr. Mateer’s appointment, in the fall
of 1887, to the chair of biology in Wooster University. He accepted the lat-
ter position with the understanding that he continue the practice of medicine
in connection with his duties as professor. Doctor Mateer founded the de-
partment. of which he is still the head, equipped it for effective work and it
is now one of the largest and most popular departments of the university.
He has devoted a number of years to the study of scientific subjects, has made
many original investigations in fields but little explored and is now recognized
as an authority on all chemical, microscopic and bacteriological methods which
have come into prominence of recent years in connection with the treatment
of disease. He has a fine private laboratory for diagnosing his own cases, in
addition to which his services are frequently utilized in special work for
other physicians and in the treatment of chronic and obstinate diseases.
Doctor Mateer is not only the master of his profession, but as a scientist
holds an important place in the world of thought and scholarship. His labors
have been eminently creditable and successful and by reason of his superior
methods of treatment and the original discoveries which he has made from
time to time he may be considered a true benefactor of suffering humanity.
Availing himself of every opportunity to add to his professional and scien-
tific knowledge and skill, he keeps in close touch with the trend of current
thought and abreast of the times in all the latest discoveries. He belongs tQ
the Wayne County Medical Society, Northeastern Ohio Medical Society, the
American Medical Association, and is an influential member of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. He was one of the founders
of the Wooster Hospital and has ever manifested a commendable interest in
the institution, laboring constantly for its success and sparing no reasonable
efforts to make it meet the high purposes which the originators had in view.
The domestic life of Doctor Mateer dates from October 25, 1888, when
he was united in marriage with Elizabeth Gaston, of East Liverpool, Ohio,
daughter of George and Rachael (Montgomery) Gaston, a union blessed with
four children, viz: John Gaston, born February 14, 1890, a junior in the
Wooster University; Mary Nelson, born September 2, 1891 ; Elizabeth Mont-
gomery, born July 31, 1894, and Dorothy, who first saw the light of day on
November 1, 1901.
Doctor and Mrs. Mateer are members of the Westminster Presbyterian
church, and take an active interest in all lines of good work under the auspices
of the same. In politics he is independent in all the term implies, refusing
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to acknowledge the behests of parties or partisans and casting his ballot for
the candidates best qualified for the offices to which they aspire. A ripe
scholar, a noted scientist, a distinguished physician and withal a courteous and
polished gentleman, Doctor Mateer wields a wide influence for good and has
made the world wiser and better by his presence. He comes of a family of
culture and refinement and of strong religious convictions, six of the seven
children born to his parents offering themselves for missionaries and four of
them being accepted. The Doctor at one time had an ambition to enter this
important field, but was rejected on account of a slight physical defect from
which he suffered when quite young. That he failed to carry out his original
intentions of going to foreign parts is a matter of congratulation on the part
of thousands of his fellowmen who have profited by his eminent abilities as a
healer of human ills and his services as a leader in important fields of scien-
tific research.
DAVID H. BRADEN, M. D.
Fortified by careful and extended professional training and a natural
predilection, the subject of this sketch holds prestige as one of the able and
popular members of the medical fraternity of Wooster, where he is engaged
in the general practice as a physician and surgeon with office headquarters
on North Sixth street. A resident of the city since 1903, he has come rapidly
to the front among the enterprising and progressive men of his calling and
as a representative of the homeopathic school of medicine he has secured a
large and lucrative patronage and is continually adding to his fame as a suc-
cessful healer.
Dr. David H. Braden is a representative of an old and well-known Ohio
family that came to the state when the country was a wilderness and the feet
of the red men still pressed the soil. His grandfather, a true type of the brave
and daring pioneer of the early days, at intervals was obliged to defend his
backwoods home from the attacks of the savages and from time to time par-
ticipated in forays against the wily foes until the latter were finally driven
from the country. He figured prominently in the early history of the state
and not only founded a large and eminently respectable family, but left the
impress of his individuality so indelibly impressed upon the community in
which he settled that his memory is there cherished as a leader of men and
a benefactor of his kind.
Daniel Braden, the Doctor’s father, was born in Ashland county in the
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year 1845 and is still living near the place of his birth. He was reared to
agricultural pursuits and for a number of years has been one of the leading
farmers and prosperous men of Milton township in the above county, where he
owns large landed interests and stands high in the esteem and confidence of his
neighbors and fellow citizens. At the breaking out of the late Civil war he
enlisted in an Ohio regiment and gave three years and three months to the
service of his country, during which time he took part in a number of noted
campaigns and bloody battles and earned an honorable record as a brave and
gallant defender of the union. In his young manhood Daniel Braden married
Mary Daniels, who also was born in the county of Ashland and who departed
this life at the early age of twenty-five years, after bearing her husband two
children, the older of whom being Mrs. William Dravenstodd, of Wayne
county, and the younger the subject of this review.
David H. Braden is a native of Ashland county, and dates his birth from
February 7, 1868. He was reared on the family homestead in Milton town-
ship and when old enough to be of service bore his share in the cultivation of
the farm where, in close touch with nature, he grew up a strong and rugged
lad and in due time was well fitted for his part in the affairs of life. Mean-
while he attended the public schools of his native county and such was his
progress that at the early age of seventeen he was able to secure a license and
take charge of a school, which he taught with credit to himself and to the sat-
isfaction of pupils and patrons. He began educational wark in the year 1887
and continued the same until 1894, during which time he earned an honorable
reputation as an able and judicious instructor and had he seen fit to devote his
life to this line of effort he doubtless would have risen to a place of distinc-
tion among the leading educators of the state. Not caring to continue any
longer in a calling which promised so little emolument, the Doctor, while teach-
ing, yielded to a desire of long standing by taking up the study of medicine
and in 1891 entered the Cleveland Medical College, which he attended during
the greater part of that and the ensuing year. Later, 1893, he became a stu-
dent of medicine and surgery in the same city where he prosecuted his studies
and researches until 1895, on March 27th of which year he was graduated
with a creditable record as an industrious and enterprising student, standing
among the first of his class and enjoying to a marked degree the confidence of
the professors of the institution as well as the students.
Immediately after receiving his degree Doctor Braden located at the
town of New Pittsburg, in his native county, where he initiated the practice
of his profession and where during the four years ensuing he built up a repre-
sentative business and earned more than local repute as an enterprising, wide-
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awake and successful physician. At the expiration of the period indicated he
transferred his practice to Shelby, in the same county, whither his reputation
had preceded him. but after three years in that town he sought a wider field
for the exercise of his talents by removing to W ooster, where since 1903 he
has devoted his attention very closely to his chosen calling with the result that
he now commands an extensive and very lucrative professional business
which from the year indicated has steadily grown in magnitude and im-
portance.
Doctor Braden has made commendable progress in the noble profession to
which he is devoting his energies and talents and. as already stated, is recog-
nized as one of the leading physicians and surgeons of the beautiful city which
he proposes to make his permanent home, being held in high esteem by his
professional contemporaries and by the general public. His financial success
has been commensurate with the ability displayed in his chosen field of en-
deavor and he is now well situated to enjoy the many material comforts which
have come to him as the reward of duty faithfully performed. He keeps in
the front rank in following out the advances made in the science of medicine
and surgery and in addition to his high professional attainments manifests a
commendable interest in all that makes for the general good of the community
along other lines and is in sympathy with all laudable enterprises and measures
for the welfare of his fellow men. He is a member of the Masonic, Odd Fel-
lows and W oodmen orders, and while well informed on the leading questions
of the day takes little interest in party politics and has no ambition to gratify
in the way of public position. He is first of all a physician, making his pro-
fession paramount to every other consideration, which accounts in a large
measure for the eminent position to which he has attained and the success by
which his professional career has ever been characterized.
Doctor Braden was married in the year 1888 to Minnie Reed, of Ashland
county, who died in 1898 after bearing her husband three children, namely:
Carl. Lloyd and Vera, aged eighteen, sixteen and twelve years, respectivelv.
In 1899 the Doctor contracted a marriage with his present wife, who bore the
maiden name of Lucy Piper, of Xew Pittsburg. W ayne county, daughter of
the late Henry Piper, a well known citizen of that town, the union l>eing with-
out issue.
SAMCEL HARRISOX MILLER.
The biographer can see nothing but good results flowing from the life
work of the ancestors ot the gentleman whose name forms the introduction
to this sketch, for they were persons of the highest respectability and of
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unusual intelligence, therefore were leaders in their respective communities
and useful citizens, their influence having always been strong for upright liv-
ing and steady industry. Many of these traits seem to be possessed by
Samuel H. Miller, a well-known business man of Doylestown. Wayne county.
He is the son of John and Susan (Bauer) Miller and was born in Nazareth,
Northampton county, Pennsylvania, May 28. 1839, and in May, 1843. he
came with his parents to Norton township, Summit county. Ohio. He was
educated in the district schools, also attended the high school at Akron, and,
being a close student, he received a very serviceable education. He left
the home farm when twelve years of age. and, having very early in life
shown an inclination to the mercantile life, he began clerking in the store
of Milton W. Henry, of Akron, Ohio, where he remained for a period of
six years, rendering that gentleman very efficient service. In December,
1863, he came to Doylestown and engaged as bookkeeper for Cline, Seiber-
ling & Hower. manufacturers of mowers and reapers. So faithful and
efficient were his services that on September 1, 1865. he was admitted to
the firm and the name was changed to Cline. Seiberling & Company, and it
was again changed on December 31, 1878, to Seiberling, Miller & Company,
composed of John F. Seil:erling, of Akron; James H. Seiberling and Samuel
H. Miller, of Doylestown. In March, 1896, the firm was changed to Seiber-
ling & Miller. John F. Seiberling having withdrawn. This firm continued
with usual success until March, 1901, when the firm was incorporated under
the laws of Ohio under the name of Seiberling & Miller Company, and they
have thus continued in business to this date, manufacturing mowers, reap-
ers and binders of a very high grade and which find a ready market owing
to their excellent qualities, the business rapidly growing and invading new
territory .from year to year. Their plant is well equipped with modern
machinery and a large force of the most skilled artisans is kept constantly
employed.
Samuel H. Miller was married on August 29. 1867, to Ella L. Schneider,
daughter of Alfred and Clarissa ( Clewell ) Schneider, who was born in Han-
over, Montgomery county, Pennsylvania, on January 27, 1847. In 1852
the family removed to Norton township. Summit county, Ohio. Eight
children have been born to Mr. and Mrs. Miller, four of whom are living,
namely: Fred J., born December 8. 1868, is living at Cuyahoga Falls. Ohio;
William R., born March 6, 1875. a mechanical engineer at Akron; Sydney
L., born April 5, 1885, is living at Doylestown, Ohio: Lucile M. (Shinier),
born November 3, 1886, is residing at Nazareth, Pennsylvania.
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Mr. Miller is treasurer and director of the Indiana Rubber and Insu-
lated Wire Company, of Jonesboro, Indiana, and he is also interested in
farming. He has been very successful as a business man owing to his close
application to individual affairs and his genteel demeanor in his relations
with his fellowmen.
Mr. Miller has always been a Republican, having voted for Abraham
Lincoln in i860. He has never held public office, except having served on the
local board of education and as village treasurer. He is a member of the
lodge and encampment. Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Masonic lodge,
chapter, council and commanderv, and Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite,
Valley of Cleveland, also Alkoran Temple, Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles
of the Mystic Shrine, Cleveland, Ohio.
WILLIAM C. MYERS.
On the roster of Wayne county's solid and influential business men the
name of William C. Myers stands out clear and prominent as the head of the
largest insurance agencies of Wooster and one of the most successful in the
state. He has achieved a wide and honorable reputation among the progres-
sive men of his adopted county and no one commands a greater influence or
stands higher in the esteem and confidence of the public.
The Myers family, which is of German origin and originally pronounced
Moyer, came to the United States in a very early day and settled near Phil-
adelphia, Pennsylvania, where in due time the name became identified with a
number of important interests and figured for a number of years in local an-
nals. Contemporaneous with this family were the Funcks, who also emi-
grated from Germany and were among the early comers to eastern Pennsyl-
vania, where in the course of a few years their descendants became not only
quite numerous but prominent in building up their respective communities and
developing the resources of the country. From the most reliable data obtain-
able, the antecedents of the latter family in the country appear to have been
one Bishop Henry Funck, who came from Germany some time in the sev-
enteenth century and settled not far from Philadelphia, from whence his
descendants, as above indicated, moved to other counties and localities, some
of them in after years moving to Ohio and still farther west.
Capt. Ralph Funck, a native of Pennsylvania, moved in an early day to
Wayne county, and here spent the remainder of his days, dying a number of
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years ago and leaving a family of several children, among whom was a daugh-
ter by the name of Cecelia Funck, whose birth occurred in Northampton coun-
ty, Pennsylvania, February 27, 1832. On November 4, 1852, she became the
wife of Isaac H. Myers, son of John O. and Elizabeth (Haldeman) Myers, of
Bucks county, Pennsylvania, the marriage taking place in Wayne county,
Ohio, where Mr. Myers had settled a short time previously.
For several years after their marriage, Isaac H. and Cecelia Myers lived
in the town of Chester, but about 1859 moved to Seville, Medina county,
where they continued to reside until 1864, when they changed their abode
to Wooster, with the interests of which city the remainder of Mr. Myers’ life
was identified. For some years he conducted a grocery store and built up a
lucrative patronage. He then turned his attention to the insurance business,
in which he met with signal success, establishing an agency which, under
the joint management of himself and son, William C., in due time became
the largest enterprise of the kind in the city and since passing into the hands
of the latter has become one of the most successful in the state.
Isaac H. Myers took the road as special insurance agent in 1878, from
which time until shortly before his death, on June 5, 1907, he traveled quite
extensively in the interest of his companies and achieved honorable repute as
a capable, far-seeing and thoroughly reliable business man. His wife, who
suffered a stroke of paralysis in 1887, departed this life very suddenly on the
4th day of April, 1895, and was laid to rest in the cemetery at Wooster,
where her husband now sleeps by her side awaiting the resurrection of the
just. The children of this estimable couple, three in number, are Isadore,
born August 1, 1857, died January 25, 1882; Lura, whose birth occurred
March 8, 1867, and who lives in Wooster, and William C, the subject of this
sketch, who was born in Seville, Medina county, Ohio, on January 28, 1861.
William C. Myers was about four years old when his parents moved to
Wooster, and since 1865 his life has been very closely interwoven with the
growth and development of his adopted city. At the proper age he entered
the public schools, where he pursued his studies until graduating from the
high school, after which he assisted his father in the latter’s insurance busi-
ness, having been familiar with the duties of the office from his twelfth year.
Engaging with his father on a salary, he soon acquired a practical knowledge
of insurance and under his able and skillful management it was not long
until the business took on new life and became the largest and most success-
ful of the kind in the city.
The insurance agency of which Mr. Myers is now the head and which
for some time has been known under the style of W. C. Myers & Company,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
was established in 1870 by the subject’s father, who continued as its manager
until accepting the position of special traveling agent in 1878, when William
C. took charge of the business and has ever since conducted the same. On
attaining his majority he became his father’s partner, but within a short time
thereafter succeeded to the business, which since the year 1878 he has prac-
tically controlled and which under his initiative and successful methods has
grown so rapidly that he now leads all competition in his own city and county
and occupies a commanding position among the leading insurance men of
Ohio.
The career of Mr. Myers affords a notable example of the exercise of
those qualities of mind which overcome obstacles and win success and his ex-
ample is worthy of imitation by those who are dissatisfied with present attain-
ments and who would aspire to higher positions of honor and trust. A busi-
ness man in the broadest sense of the term, his integrity has ever been above
suspicion, while his methods will bear the test of the severest criticism and
among his fellow citizens his name has always been synonymous with fair
and honorable dealing. While subordinating every other consideration to
his business affairs, he has not been unmindful of his obligations as a citizen,
as is indicated by the interest he manifests in the public welfare, nor is he
negligent of those social ties which every well ordered community requires of
those who constitute its mainstay and support. Aside from his insurance in-
terests he is identified with various local enterprises, including among others
the Citizens’ National Bank of Wooster, of which he is a director and one of
the largest stockholders. He is prominent in Odd Fellowship, being an influ-
ential worker in the lodge at Wooster, which he has the honor to represent
in the sovereign grand lodge and to his efforts are largely due the growth
and popularity of the brotherhood in the city of his residence.
The domestic chapter in the life history of Mr. Myers bears date of No-
vember 28, 1888. at which time was solemnized his marriage with Mary Hay-
maker, of Warren, Ohio, daughter of Jesse and Abbie P. Haymaker, of that
city, and a niece of Ephraim Quinby, one of the early settlers and prominent
residents of Wooster. Mr. and Mrs. Myers have no children of their own,
but take great interest in the young people of the city to whom the doors of
their beautiful home are ever open and among whom their bounty is freely
and lavishly dispensed. Alive to every good work and in touch with all
laudable measures and humanitarian projects, this excellent couple fill a large
place in the public life of Wooster, and the high esteem in which they are held
bv the people of the city, irrespective of class or condition, bears eloquent tes-
timony to their amiable qualities of head and heart.
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653
THEO. P. BOWMAN.
Success in this life comes to the deserving. It is an axiom demonstrated
by all human experience, that a man gets out of this life what he puts into it,
plus a reasonable interest on the investment. The individual who inherits a
large estate and adds nothing to his fortune can not be callefl a successful
man. He that falls heir to a large fortune and increases its value is success-
ful in porportion to the amount he adds to his possession. But the man who
starts in the world unaided and by sheer force of will, controlled by correct
principles, forges ahead and at length reaches a position of honor among his
fellow citizens achieves success such as representatives of the two former
classes can neither understand nor appreciate. To a considerable extent the
subject of this sketch is a creditable representative of the class last named, a
class which has furnished much of the bone and sinew of the country and
added to the stability of the government and its institutions.
Theo. P. Bo\vman was born in Richland county, Ohio, on the 19th of
April, 1873, and is a son of Henry and Mary (Plank) Bowman. He is de-
scended from German antecedents and inherits the sturdy qualities which made
representatives of that nationality such a desirable element in our great cos-
mopolitan population. Henry Bowman was born in Pennsylvania and when
a young man came to Ohio, settling in Richland county, where he followed
agricultural pursuits. He retained his residence there until his death, which
occurred in 1891, at the comparatively early age of forty-eight years. Mary
Plank Bowman was born and reared in Wayne county and is now living at
Butler, Richland county. By her union with Henry Bowman she became
the mother of six children, named as follows : Sherman E., of Richland
county; Theo., subject of this sketch; Ira C, of Richland county; Anna
E., who is the wife of William McKowan and resides in Richland county;
LeRoy, of Butler, Ohio, and Arthur, who resides with his mother at Butler.
Theo. P. Bowman remained with his parents until he was fifteen years
old and secured a fair education in the common schools. At the age men-
tioned he went to Mifflin, Ashland county, and entered the employ of an
uncle, who operated a flouring mill, with whom he remained three years. In
1894 he came to Wooster and went to work for Plank & Gray, millers, with
whom he remained twelve years, seven years as a miller and five years in the
capacity of traveling salesman. In May, 1902, Mr. Bowman established him-
self in the grocery business and has from the start met with a gratifying suc-
cess. 1 1 is store is well stocked with a carefully selected line of goods, and
evervthing in the various lines usually carried in a well-equipped grocery are
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
to be had. Especial attention is given to the individual wants of his cus-
tomers with the result that his trade has steadily grown from year to year.
In 1896 Mr. Bowman married Flora B. Matz, who was born and reared
in Wooster, the daughter of Wellington Matz. To this union two children
have been born, namely: Neal F., born June 3, 1899, and Esther Fay, born
in August, 1901.
Mr. Bowman is a Republican in politics, though he does not take a very
active part in public affairs. His fraternal relations are with the Modern
Woodmen of America. Mr. and Mrs. Bowman are consistent members of
the German Reformed church, to which they give their earnest support. The
subject is a man of strong purpose and unfaltering industry, a reliable and
enterprising gentleman and ever faithful to his duties of citizenship.
ARCHIBALD B. CAMPBELL, M. D.
The physician who would succeed in his profession must possess many
qualities of head and heart not included in the curriculum of the schools and
colleges he may have attended. In analyzing the career of the successful
practitioner of the healing art it will invariably be found to be true that a
broad-minded sympathy with the sick and suffering and an honest, earnest
desire to aid his afflicted fellow men have gone hand in hand with skill and
able judgment. The gentleman to whom this brief tribute is given fortu-
nately embodies these necessary qualifications in a marked degree and by
energy and close application to his professional duties he has built up an
enviable reputation and drawn to himself a large and remunerative patronage.
Dr. Campbell's paternal grandfather was James Campbell, a native of
Scotland, who emigrated to Canada in 1831. bringing with him his family,
consisting of five sons and three daughters. These children all located in
Elgin county, Ontario, and all reared large families. James Campbell was
a farmer bv vocation and followed this pursuit during all of his active years.
He died at the age of eighty-two years, leaving several hundred descendants.
The subject’s father, John Campbell, who was bom in Argyleshire, Scotland,
came to Canada with his parents in 1831. locating in Elgin county, Ontario,
which at that time was a dense wilderness. The family went to work clearing
the land and planting crops and in a few years they had farms that would
have done credit to the more older settled sections of the continent. John
Campbell spent the balance of his life on this farm which he cleared and
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655
died there in 1891, at the age of eighty-one years. For forty years he was
a prominent member of the Presbyterian church and his faith was shown by
his works. He married Margaret McIntyre, also a native of Argyleshire,
Scotland, born in 1818, or seven years subsequent to the birth of her husband.
She is now residing on the Elgin county farm, at the ripe old age of ninety-
two years. John and Margaret Campbell were the parents of nine children,
five sons and four daughters.
The subject of this sketch remained on the paternal homestead during
his youth and received a good education in the common schools. As a means
to an end, with the medical profession in view, he engaged in teaching, which
vocation he followed during five years. In 1869 and 1870 he attended the
medical department of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, graduat-
ing there in 1871 with the degree of Doctor of Medicine. Entering at once
on the practice of his profession, he located first at Western Star, Summit
county, Ohio, where he practiced for two years. In May, 1873, he removed
to Canal Fulton, Stark county, Ohio, and remained there until October,
1901, when he came to Orrville, where he has since remained. He conducts
a general practice in medicine and surgery and is numbered among the most
successful practitioners in this section of the county. He keeps in close
touch with the advances continually being made in his profession, and all
improvements of a practical nature he readily adopts, ever earnestly desiring
to attain as high a degree of perfection as possible in the prosecution of his
life work.
In 1876 Doctor Campbell married Amelia Upjohn, the daughter of Dr.
Uriah Upjohn, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she was born and reared.
She died one and a half years after their marriage, leaving a son, Archibald
Upjohn Campbell, who is now a member of the Upjohn Pharmaceutical
Company, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, one of the largest manufacturers of
physician’s supplies in the country, and of which he is a stockholder. In
1883 Dr. Campbell married Etta McMillen, a daughter of John McMillen,
of Stark county, this state, and a sister of the late Dr. McMillen, of Orrville.
The Doctor keeps in touch with his professional brethren through his
membership in the Wayne County Medical Society, the Sixth Congres-
sional District Medical Society and the Ohio State Medical Association. In
religion the Doctor and his wife are members of the Presbyterian church at
Orrville and take a deep and abiding interest in its welfare. Fraternally, he
is a member of the Free and Accepted Masons, which he joined as soon as
he had reached his majority. In politics he supports the Republican party.
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656
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
He was a member of the board of education of Canal Fulton, Stark county,
for eighteen years and has always been deeply interested in educational
matters. He served for eight years as pension examining surgeon in Stark
county, and is now surgeon for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and the
Cleveland, Akron & Columbus Railroad Company.
Doctor Campbell is descended from a remarkable family of self-made
men whose ancestors settled in the Canadian wilderness eighty years ago.
His progenitors were of a hardy race, big, strong men, who carved their
way to success by sheer force of will. Twenty-two descendants of the Scotch
farmer who first settled in the western world are now successful professional
men, twenty of them being physicians, one a lawyer and one a dentist.
Fauquhar Campbell, a brother of the subject's father, had nine sons, and of
these seven became physicians and one a lawyer.
* EZRA D. McINTIRE.
The life history of him whose name heads this sketch has been closely
identified with the history of Wayne county. His life has been one of untiring
activity and has been crowned with a degree of success attained by those only
who devote themselves imlefatigably to the work before them. He is of a
high type of business man and none more than he deserves a fitting recogni-
tion among the men whose genius and abilities have achieved results that are
most enviable and commendable. As a servant of the people of his county
Mr. Mclntire acquitted himself with the highest honors and that he is now
in private life is because he no longer desired the official position which he
had filled satisfactorily for so many years.
Ezra D. Mclntire, whose fine farm of two hundred acres lies in Wooster
and Franklin townships, was born in Franklin township, this county. Decem-
l>er 22, 1844. on the farm which his father had entered from the govern-
ment and which is now owned by the subject. He is a son of Cornelius and
Nancy ( Rayl) Mclntire. The subject's paternal grandfather was John Mc-
lntire. who was born in county Derry, Ireland, in 1755. He emigrated to
the United States in 1782. and settled at York. Pennsylvania. He was there
engaged in farming for fifteen years, at the end of which time he moved
to near Steubenville. Ohio, on what was then known as the Mingo Bottoms.
In 1820 he came to Franklin township. Wayne county, Ohio, where he spent
his remaining days. He was the father of eight children, namely: John,
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(
<
Digitized by boogie
• 1 > v K C (>' ' NTV. OHIO.
a 1 - * <i of education of ( 'Mai Inin >n. Stark count v,
1 , ! i'i\\a\^ keen deeplv interested in educational
■; \w:m a- pension examining >nr^eon in Stark
• •*: :■•! the ! Ypfisx 1\ ania Railr- *ad Cotupanv and t lie
.’■■Tr-dn.^ *•’ -!■!;« »ad Company
V *■* o . — - | Mom a rem(lrkaMe family of self-ma *
• - ^ m*' ! m the C 'anadian wdderness eitfjrtv vears ;o,
*<•< ■ ** i , it d v ra* e, kuy, strong men. who rarer*1 aeir
- • ••« mf will. i went', -two deswatdatn> ot tk- eoteh
n ! he weOeni world are now successful p* ^sional
oemo | livvie.ans. one a lawyer and on- .. dentist,
a brother <*« the subject X fat hem had nin-' ns. and of
■ p|| <dyjam a'*o ■ ‘fie a law ver.
f :ka i). Mem ik is
. • . whose name heads h -kewh lias keen chicly
■ \\ ayne county. Hi- ' has keen mite of untiring
. t. d with a decree of cess attained hv those onlv
- ie fat iyal ly to tile k before them, lie is of a
4 Vi and none more * i he deserves a tilting recn^ni-
: a :■ •: a ■ • ■' ko.se genius and a?1 ;s have achieved results that are
i •'?. emah . e< • nmtnd Jre As a : amt of ’he people of lu’s conmv
Mr. McJniitt .omitted hinwlf v\ itli - kigf'iest imnors and that he h nov
in -private i o is became ke no lot1-.- desired the ofhctal position winch lie
had fillet! s4.Msfactorih- for m> mam ears.
• I .zra ! M'dnttre. whose h * oan ot two hundred aeres lies in \\ofKtrr
and I'rankl’ii tow mhins. was 1 m kranklm township, this eoantv, 1 )e*'em
her j_m iSpp on the him m his faiher had erueied bom the yew em-
inent and w Inch is u< . w o\ i hy die stikjeet. lie is a sou of Cornel ins and
\anev i Khn 1 ) Melmire. t tie siilijeet's paternal y rand fat her was |ohn Me-
Inti’e. who was horn 1,1 < minty I h na , I inland. m i y ; 5 . lie emigrated t *
d,e Cirn d Stan^ ,u *'j. and ^ e 1 1 It d at York, IVunw 1 \ atiia. lit' \\(> there
eneamM m larmi; n»r fifteen years, at the end of which time he m*>\rd
to near btenkem ’ : V. ( huo on w 1ml was ;hen kirmn as the Mmwi l h an.ms
in iSnohee.u < ■ ■ brinkim 'oanshf|.. \\ awue cbmru , < >hio. w ke: t he s|,c*m
h’s Minawnna days. He w 1 1 - the lather of e 1 nil! chddren. nam* 1\' : |ohep
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
657
James, Smith, William, Archibald, Cornelius, Sarah and Catherine, all of
whom are now deceased. Cornelius Mclntire was born in Fayette county,
Pennsylvania, July 20, 1800, and accompanied his parents on their removal
to Ohio in 1820. He at once entered upon the task of clearing the land for
cultivation and the same season succeeded in sowing four acres to wheat.
He was an energetic man during all his active life and was widely known
because of his enterprising spirit and progressive methods. He followed
farming all his life and was eminently successful. He was a member of the
Presbyterian church, while his wife belonged to the Lutheran denomination.
He was a Democrat in politics and served as trustee of Franklin township.
H is death occurred in 1881 and his wife died in 1886. their remains being
interred in the cemetery at their home. On the 24th of January, 1828. Cor-
nelius Mclntire married Nancy Rayl. who was born in Beaver county, Penn-
sylvania, in 1 8 1 1 , and who came to Franklin township, Wayne county, Ohio,
with her parents in 1819. To them were bom the following children : Mary
Jane, who became the wife of Daniel Derringer; George, deceased; Reason,
deceased; Hannah, the wife of Mr. Greenwald, of Wooster; Sarah, deceased;
Sophronia, deceased; Cornelius, who lives at Needles, California; William,
deceased; Fzra D.. the subject of this sketch; Elizabeth, the wife of John
Craven, of Wooster township; Susan, deceased, who was the wife of Cyrus
Franks; John W., deceased, and Jacob, who also has died.
Ezra D. Mclntire received a good common school education and was
reared to the life of a farmer. He remained as the assistant of his father on
the home farm until he was twenty- four years of age. During the following
two years he was in various parts of the West and then engaged in the oil
business in Pennsylvania for a number of years. Then locating in Defiance,
Ohio, he engaged in the lumber and milling business until 1881, when he
returned to Wayne county and in the following spring he received the appoint-
ment as superintendent of the county infirmary. This position he held for
twenty-three consecutive years and in all this period there was never heard
an expression but that of satisfaction regarding his conduct of this respon-
sible and ofttimes trying position. In consecutive years he held the office
longer than any other man in the history of this state, certainly a remarkable
and unmistakable recognition of his eminent business qualities. He had in
his charge the insane, epileptics and poor wards of the county and he gave to
them and the various other interests of the home the same careful and pains-
taking attention that he gives to his own private affairs. In the spring of
1904 Mr. Mclntire retired from the superintendency and located on his farm
U-’)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
658
in section ! 4. where he is now living. He is a thorough and practical farmer
and is numbered among the leading men of the community.
Mr. Mclntire married Mariah Sweeney, and to them have been born the
following children: Eva, who died young; Walter, at home; Florence, who is
the wife of Oliver Mock, of Franklin township; Arthur Clark, of Wooster,
who married Daisy Dunham. In politics Mr. Mclntire has rendered a starfch
allegiance to the Democratic party, and at one time he served as assessor of
Franklin township. He has served as a delegate to county, state and national
conventions of his party and has always been influential in the councils of his
party. Fraternally he is a member of the Free and Accepted Masons, having
been made a Master Mason in Ebenezer Lodge, at Wooster, in 1889. He has
also taken the degrees of the council of Royal Arch Masons and the com-
mandery of Knights Templar, in all of which bodies he is active. No one
in the community enjoys a better reputation for integrity of word and deed
than does the subject, and when a man stands high in the estimation of the
people who have known him during all the years of his life no greater testi-
monial of his worth can be given. He has had the best interests of his com-
munity at heart, and he was largely instrumental in having the state agri-
cultural experiment station located in Wayne county.
JOSEPH OWEX FRITZ.
Although yet a young man, Joseph O. Fritz has made his influence felt
at the Wayne county bar and won general recognition as an attorney of un-
usual force and ability and while he has established a solid reputation in legal
affairs he has also won the confidence and good will of his fellow' citizens owing
to his habits of industry and his fidelity to right principles of action in his
social intercourse with those with whom he comes into contact, and to such
as he future years needs must be replete with honor and abundant success.
Mr. Fritz was born in Milton township. Wayne county. Ohio, on Novem-
ber (). 1872. and he is the son of a farmer, his ancestry being among the sterling
and substantial stock that reclaimed this country from the wilderness and
while they may not have produced leaders of men in any of the walks of life,
they formed the bone and sinew of the body politic, making possible the great
development and the wondrous successes of the present generation. He is the
son of Elmore and Jemima ( P>artholomew) Fritz. His grandparents were,
on the paternal side. Philip and Mary (Long) Fritz, and on the maternal side.
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659
Owen and Leah (Mill) Bartholomew. The subject's paternal great-grand-
father, Martin Fritz, was a member of Capt. Samuel Cochran’s company, the
Tenth Battalion Pennsylvania Militia, and served five years in the Revolution-
ary war. In 1771, when but fourteen years of age, he left France alone, and,
coming to America, first settled in Venango county, Pennsylvania. He mar-
ried Catherine Wildt, who had six sisters, all of whom settled in the vicinity
of Doylestown, Wayne county, Ohio, and founded pioneer families in that sec-
tion. In June, 1814, Martin Fritz settled in Milton township, Wayne county,
being the first white settler in that township.
Mr. Fritz was always a studious lad and when a mere boy he was actuated
by an ambition to become an attorney-at-law, and while living on the farm
where he assisted with work about the place in the summer months, at-
tending the neighboring schools in the wintertime, he began laying plans for a
future career in the legal profession. He later received a good commercial
and academic education, having studied at the Western Reserve Normal Col-
lege, Wadsworth, Ohio, and taken a full course at the Massillon Business Col-
lege, in each of which he made splendid records.
Mr. Fritz was admitted to the bar at Columbus, Ohio, October 14, 1899,
having pursued a thorough course of law in the office of Messrs. John and
Robert L. Adair. He was successful in the practice from the first and he now
enjoys a very liberal patronage. He opened an office in Creston, Wayne
county, about February, 1900, and came to Wooster December 1, 1903. He
has gradually grown in strength in the local courts until he is now fully abreast
of the times in his chosen profession. In his trial of cases, his intercourse,
argument, and competitions with the other members of the bar, he treats them
with respect and kindness. In disposition and temperament he is bland, ap-
proachable and sociable, liberal and accommodating, high-spirited and inde-
pendent. a natural man in a natural way, asserting himself and relying upon
himself, and accomplishing his ends by his own methods and processes.
Joseph O. Fritz was married, on June 2, 1899, to Clementine Kick, a
daughter of John and Mary (Wolf) Kick, who was born in Lake township,
Ashland county, Ohio, and to them were born six children, four of whom are
living, namely: Ward Anderson, Myrna C. Carl Joseph and Philip. Mary
Veda died at the age of six years and Frank at one year of age.
Politically, the subject is affiliated with the Democratic party, while his
fraternal relations are with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. Re-
ligiously, he is a member of the English Lutheran church, to which he renders
a hearty support.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
ROBERT CAMERON, SR.
For many years the subject of this sketch has been actively and prominent-
ly identified with the business and civic affairs of Wooster, being one of the
leading contractors and builders of the county and having been concerned in
the erection of many of the best buildings in the city and vicinity. A native
of bonnie Scotland, he has evidenced in his life here many of the sterling
qualities which characterize that virile race and he is occupying an enviable
position in the community.
Robert Cameron’s ancestors for many generations have been born and
reared in Scotland, his great-grandfather, grandfather and father, all bearing
the Christian name of John, having been of that sturdy race. The subject’s
father was a farmer and contractor, and was a man of unquestioned honor, it
having been literally true that his word was as good as his bond. He was
born in 1809, and died in 1893, at aSe °f eighty-four years. His birth
was thus coincident with Lincoln, Gladstone and several other men whose
names are household words throughout the world. The subject's grand-
father, John Cameron, was also a contractor and died at the age of seventy-
two years. He was a presiding magistrate for many years, and several mem-
bers of this family in the paternal line were burgesses, an office of distinction,
carrying with it a number of special privileges. The subject's mother bore
the maiden name of Christina Jackson, and she died on New Year day, 1876,
at the age of seventy-six years. Her father, Thomas Jackson, was a nail-
maker, and was descended from a long line of Scotch ancestors. To John
and Christina Cameron were born ten children, eight of whom grew to
mature years, their names being as follows:
(1) John was a civil surgeon at Lucknow, India. On the completion
of his service there, he contemplated a visit to the subject in America, but
while en route, he dropped dead in a hotel at Sydney, New South Wales.
His wife was a niece of Lord Mayo and is now living in London.
(2) Thomas, who died in June, 1876, was horn in Scotland and his
remains now lie in the historic graveyard at Cathcart. He came to America
in 1856, locating in Canada, and in the following year he came to the United
States. He was a stonecutter by trade and was employed in the erection of
the Washington monument at Washington. D. C. He visited Scotland in
i860, returning to the United States in the following year. At the outbreak
of the Civil war he enlisted for the three months' service, and at the expira-
tion of that period he re-enlisted for three years. lie participated in the bat-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
66l
ties of Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, and was captured in
the last named engagement. At the close of the war he took up his residence
in Wooster, Ohio, and engaged in the contracting business, erecting most of
the prominent buildings of that day here.
(3) James, who died in 1884, was a marine engineer and was chief
engineer on the Dutch mail service. His death occurred in Glasgow, and
there his widow and her three sons and a daughter now reside.
(4) Robert, the fourth in order of birth, is the immediate subject of
this sketch.
(5) Archibald was a doctor in the Queen’s India service, but was sub-
sequently retired. He had been civil surgeon of the sacred city of Benares,
the highest position a civil surgeon could occupy in India, he holding the rank
of major in the medical service. He was retired after a long and faithful
service, and in 1895 started on his return to his home in Scotland. On the
way he stopped at London and started for the war office to settle his accounts.
On the way he was waylaid and murdered and robbed.
(6) Janet, who now resides at Southport, England, is the widow of
John Miller and is the mother of seven sons and four daughters. John Miller
was the inventor of millerain, a waterproof cloth much used by the British
government.
(7) Christina is the wife of Dr. Meikham, of Glasgow, Scotland, and
they are the parents of three sons.
(8) Agnes is the wife of Capt. William Burns, of the marine service.
He was for many years the captain of American and Indian liners and for
some time has been engaged in an effort to find the lost treasure ship of the
Spanish Armada, which was sunken off the shore of Scotland in 1588.
Robert Cameron, Sr., was born in the county of Lanark, on the banks
of the Clyde, two and a half miles south of the city of Glasgow, Scotland, on
the 5th day of March, 1842. He secured his education in the schools of his
native county, making such rapid progress in his studies that he was enabled
to complete his academic course at thirteen years of age. He then learned the
trade of carpenter and joiner and in 1867 he came to the United States, lo-
cating at Wooster, Ohio. He first went into a commission merchant’s office
as junior bookkeeper. This was immediately after leaving school. Was
later employed by the Rock Island & Pacific Railroad Company in the ca-
pacity of foreman in the erection of the new shops. This was in 1868. A
short while later, however, he returned to Wooster. In 1869 he returned to
Scotland, where he was married, and the following year came back to
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Wooster and resumed work at his trade. In 1871 he began general con-
tracting on his own account and has followed that occupation since, with
the exception of a period of seven years, during which time he was engaged
in the lumber business. In his business affairs he has been successful, having
erected many of the best buildings, both for business and residence purposes
in this city and vicinity. His work has always stood the closest inspection
and he is accounted one of the best workmen in the local field.
Robert Cameron has taken a deep interest in military matters and was
a member of the Ohio National Guard, being first lieutenant of Company D,
of the Eighth Regiment, which command was afterwards known as ‘‘McKin-
ley's Own." All of his sons excepting the youngest were also members of this
company. The military spirit was strong in the hearts of the boys and two
of them, Robert and Nathaniel, saw service in the Spanish-American war in
1898. They were both in the Santiago campaign, Robert being invalided
and sent home, while Nathaniel was sent to Bellevue hospital.
In 1869, as stated above, Air. Cameron returned to the land of hills and
heather and took unto himself a helpmeet in the person of Mary Jane Col-
ledge, of North Shields. She was born in Howden-on-the-Tyne, and was a
daughter of Nathaniel Colledge, a prosperous provision merchant of that
village. This union was blessed in the birth of nine children, two of whom
died in infancy unnamed. Those who attained to mature years are briefly
mentioned as follows : John Archibald, a carpenter and joiner at Akron,
Ohio, is married and the father of two children; Christina Jackson is house-
keeper and companion for her father; Robert; Nathaniel C. ; James Ronald;
the three last named are all occupying important positions with the Goodrich
Rubber Company at Akron, Ohio; Walter Scott is a stenographer at Cleve-
land, Ohio; Martin Welker, the youngest, is a student in the University of
Wooster. The mother of these children died on the 21st of August, 1908,
since which time Christina has devoted herself to her father's comfort.
In politics Air. Cameron is a stanch Republican and was formerly very
active in local political matters, but of late years he has not taken a prominent
part, though still keeping in close touch with the trend of current events
in the political world. He, with his entire family, are connected with the
First Presbyterian church, of which they are regular attendants and generous
supporters. Air. Cameron has taken a deep interest in the Sunday school
and for many years prior to the death of his wife he was a teacher in that
school. He is an appreciative member of the time-honored order of Free
and Accepted Alasons, having been raised to the sublime degree of a Alaster
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663
Mason in the same lodge in Scotland in which his forefathers for many
generations had been raised. The members of the Cameron family are noted
for their splendid physique, all the male members of the family standing
at least six feet tall, and good health and splendid physical condition has
characterized them all. During a residence in this community of many
years, Mr Cameron has constantly enjoyed the absolute confidence of all
who have had dealings with him and those who know him best are his closest
friends. He has always been found on the right side of every moral issue
and gives his support to every movement that promises to benefit the com-
munity.
GILBERT D. McINTYRE.
The gentleman whose name leads this sketch has long enjoyed prestige
as a leading citizen of the community in which he resides, and as an official
against whose record no word of suspicion was ever uttered he has been an
important factor in the life of the city of his residence. There flows in his
veins Scotch blood, and in him are exhibited those sterling qualities of char-
acter which have made his father s countrymen such desirable citizens in
this great republic. Mr. McIntyre himself is a native of the Buckeye state,
having been born at Dovlestown, Wayne county, the date of his birth having
been the 13th day of August, 1849. His father was A. A. McIntyre, who
was a native of Edinburgh. Scotland, where he was reared and educated. In
1826 he came to America, locating first in Canada, where lie remained for a
number of years. About the year 1840 he came to the United States and
made his home in Ogdensburg, New York. Subsequently he removed to
Dovlestown, Wayne county, Ohio, and there he remained for a number of
years. He was a tailor bv trade and was considered a good workman. While
living at Dovlestown he was appointed postmaster and rendered efficient serv-
ice. In 1854 he again changed his residence, this time locating at Marshall-
ville, where he became the local agent for the railroad, which position he re-
tained until his death, which occurred in 1869, at which time he was seventy-
two years old. In religion he was a Presbyterian and was a man of good habits
and splendid standing among his fellow citizens. A. A. McIntyre married
Julia Plummer, who was born near Ogdensburg. New York, where she was
reared and educated, and where she met and married Mr. McIntyre. She died
in 1895 at the age of seventy-eight years. This worthy couple became the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
parents of six children, all of whom are now deceased excepting the subject
of this sketch and a sister, Mrs. John Pfunder, whose husband is now post-
master at Marshallville.
The subject of this sketdi received his education in the common schools
of his home community and at Marshallville, to which place the family re-
moved. On his father's death, in 1869, the subject succeeded him in the
position of railroad station agent, and this position he continued to occupy
until 1881. He then embarked in the insurance business, which he continued
with success until 1902, on July 10th of which year he was appointed post-
master at Orrville, to which city he removed his residence in March, 1893.
Mr. McIntyre’s conduct of the postoffice has been eminently satisfactory to
the patrons of the office, as he is courteous and accommodating and gives to
the office the same attention and the same business methods he would give to
a private business. On June 6, 1910, he received his third appointment as
postmaster, a testimonial to his efficiency and popularity.
In July, 1879, Mr. McIntyre was united in mariage to Rebecca Schlutt,
of Marshallville, where she had been born and reared, the daughter of
Charles Schlutt. To this union two children have been born, namely: Charles
G., an engineer in the employ of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and
Dora O., the wife of Dr. D. S. Burns, of Bryan, Ohio.
Socially Mr. McIntyre is a member of the time-honored order of Free
and Accepted Masons, in the workings of which he takes a deep interest.
In politics he is a Republican, but takes no very active part in public affairs,
devoting his entire attention to the performance of his official duties. Dur-
ing his residence here his characteristics have won him recognition as a man
of true worth and he commands the respect of all who know him.
ANDREW JACKSON PETERMAN.
The march of improvement and progress is accelerated day by day, and
each successive moment seems to demand of men a broader intelligence and a
greater discernment than did the preceding. Successful men must be live
men in this age. bristling with activity, and the lessons of biography may be
far-reaching to an extent not superficially evident. There can be no impro-
priety in justly scanning the acts of any man as they affect his public, social
and business relations. If he be honest and successful in his chosen field of
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
665
endeavor, investigations will brighten his fame and point the path along which
others may follow, and thus his life becomes cumulative in its favorable in-
fluence. Among the able and representative business men of Fredericksburg,
Wayne county, is numbered Mr. Peterman, who has had to do with a number
of enterprises of wide scope and importance and whose executive capacity has
been such as to enable him to achieve a definite success, while the methods
employed have been such as to gain and retain to him the confidence and high
regard of his fellow men. It is both gratifying and profitable to enter record
concerning the career of such a man, and in the following paragraphs sufficient
will be said to indicate the forceful individuality, initiative power and sterling
character of a well-known citizen of Fredericksburg.
Andrew Jackson Peterman is a native son of the old Buckeye state, hav-
ing first seen the light of day in Prairie township. Holmes county. He is a
son of James and Sarah E. (Cosper) Peterman, both of whom were natives
of Pennsylvania. James Peterman came to Ohio about 1830 and entered land
in Holmes county, where he spent his remaining days, his death occurring in
1887, at the age of eighty-two years. His wife was sixty-six years old at
the time of her death. Before coming to Holmes county Mr. Peterman had
been a contractor on the Pennsylvania and Ohio canal, constructing several
large sections of that great work, but after coming to Holmes county he fol-
lowed the vocation of farming exclusively. Politically he was a great admirer
of Andrew Jackson and took an active part in local public affairs, having
served as justice of the peace several terms and at one time was the candidate
of his party for the Legislature. He was fairly successful in his business
affairs and was considered one of the most prominent men in his part of the
county. He was a member of the Presbyterian church at Fredericksburg
until the division of that body, when he went with the congregational section
and was very active in the society, serving as trustee for a number of years.
To Mr. and Mrs. Peterman were born ten children, of whom those living are
as follows: Mrs. Margaret Ridle; Andrew J., the subject of this sketch;
Mrs. Albert Gailey, of Chicago; Mrs. Martha McCormack; R. C.,'who is presi-
dent of a banking company, lives in Chicago.
Andrew J. Peterman secured his elementary education in the district
schools of Holmes county, supplementing this by attendance at the old Smith
Academy at Fredericksburg, receiving a fair education for that period. On
completing his education, he went into the lumber business and has continued
to be identified with that line of business to the present time. He was success-
ful in the enterprise and soon afterwards added the flour business, in which
also he met with a gratifying patronage. In connection with the lumber busi-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
ness he owns a mill, in which are manufactured many articles for household
use, besides the production of all kinds of lumber and planing-mill supplies.
He has now been in these two lines about thirty-five years and has constantly
enjoyed his full share of the public patronage. One of the most important
and far-reaching steps taken by Mr. Peterman in the commercial world was the
organization and establishment of the Bank of Fredericksburg. In the prelim-
inary work incidental to the establishment of this institution Mr. Peterman was
foremost and on its organization he was elected the first president, holding
this office about eighteen months. The bank has enjoyed remarkable success
from the beginning and is now rated as one of the strong and prosperous
monetary institutions of Wayne county. It has been an important and in-
fluential factor in the commercial prosperity of this part of the county and the
community is indebted to the gentleman who had the prescience and foresight
to go ahead with the project. Mr. Peterman was also one of the organizers
of the Ohio Terra Cotta Brick Company and is still interested in the enter-
prise. This company is fortunate in being the possessor of clay beds of the
finest quality and they are producing a line of fancy brick which has found a
ready sale ever since being first put on the market. The clay is found about
one hundred feet below the surface of the ground and underlies a bed of
splendid coal. Besides the bed of yellow clav, from which most of the prod-
uct is made, the company has also discovered a sixteen-foot vein of brown
clay, lying near the surface, and from this a beautiful brown-colored brick is
made that has also caught the popular fancy. The company manufactures
brick of various kinds, and in fact makes most everything that can be made
of clay and, judging from their success of the past, they have a most promis-
ing future. Mr. Peterman takes a deep interest in anything that gives prom-
ise of benefiting the community and lends his support and encouragement to
all legitimate enterprises. He is essentially public-spirited and deservedly
occupies a high position in the regard of his fellow citizens.
On the 29th of October. 1909, Mr. Peterman was united in marriage to
Mary E. Berger, who was born in Holmes county. Ohio, the daughter of
William Berger, who was for thirty years a successful merchant at Fredericks-
burg. but whose death occurred in 1907.
In politics Mr. Peterman Ips always been a stanch supporter of the
Democratic party, though he has never taken a very active part in political
affairs. He was. however, induced to accept the responsible position of treas-
urer of the township and town, and served in this capacity for twelve years,
rendering most efficient and satisfactorv service. In religion, he and his wife
are consistent members of the Congregational church at Fredericksburg and
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
667
give to that society an earnest and generous support. A man of splendid
personal qualities, Mr. Peterman has long been recognized as one of the lead-
ing and representative citizens of Fredericksburg and as such he is eminently
entitled to representation in a work of this character. He is a worthy rep-
resentative of an honored family, one who, by reason of his sterling personal
worth, deserves and is generally accorded that esteem which comes to those
whose lives are in close touch with all that assists in advancing the community
in which they live.
JOSEPH S. SHERRICK.
That industry and sound judgment, combined with a wise economy,
both of time and money, are the surest contributing elements to success,
is exemplified in the life of the subject of this sketch, who for a number of
years was one of the successful agriculturists of Wayne county, but who
is now living in the city of Wooster, enjoying that rest which he has so
richly earned.
The subject’s grandfather on the paternal side was Joseph Sherrick, who
was a native of the state of Pennsylvania. He followed farming all the
years of his mature life and died some time in the sixties, secure in the
esteem of all who had known him. His son, Jacob B.. father of the subject
of this sketch, was born and reared in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania,
and he too took up the vocation of farming, which his ancestors had so suc-
cessfully followed for generations. In 1882 he came to Ohio, settling on
a farm located about two miles southwest of the city of Wooster, and there
he lived until his death, which occurred on the 20th day of January, 1890. He
married Sarah Shupe, who was a native of Fayette county, Pennsylvania,
and it was there she met and married Mr. Sherrick. Her death occurred in
August, 1882, soon after the family arrived at their new home in Ohio. To
Jacob and Sarah Sherrick were born four children, namely : Kate, who
lives in Wooster; Isaac, of Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania; Joseph S., the
subject of this sketch ; John, who lives three miles west of Wooster.
Joseph S. Sherrick was born in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, on
the nth of November, 1845, ancl remained with his parents until their re-
moval to Ohio in 1882. Here he farmed in partnership with his father,
following agricultural pursuits until 1907, when, on April 12th, he gave
up the labor to which he had been accustomed for so many years ancf came
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
to Wooster to live. He was financially successful in operations and was
wisely economical, so that noAv he is enjoying himself, with no cares or
burdens to annoy him.
On the 18th of March, 1877, Mr. Sherrick married Samantha Myers,
who was the daughter of Jacob and Sarah Myers, who were residents of
Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, at the time of her marriage. She was
a faithful helpmeet to him in the fullest sense of the term, and five children
came to bless their union. They are briefly mentioned as follows: Mrs.
Anna M. Ball, of Plain township, Wayne county; Jacob M., who lives on
the old home farm near Wooster; Cora S. and Emma are at home with their
father; Joseph B. lives in Wooster. The mother of these children passed
away on October 23, 1894. She was a woman of many splendid qualities of
character and during her life she enjoyed the warm regard of all who came
in contact with her. Mr. Sherrick is a faithful member of the Lutheran
church and takes a deep interest in its welfare. He is also a director of the
Commercial Bank, in which he holds a block of stock. Though unostenta-
tious and unassuming, Mr. Sherrick is possessed of those sterling qualities
of manhood which commend him to the regard of those who know him.
His life among his fellow men has been without malice and his friends
are in number as his acquaintances.
REV. WILLIAM E. FEEMAN.
A man who boldly faces the responsibilities of life and by determined
and untiring energy carves out for himself an honorable success exerts a
powerful influence upon the lives of all who follow him. Such men consti-
tute the foundation of our republican institutions and are the pride of
our civilization. To them life is so real that they find no time to plot either
mischief or vice. Their lives are bound up in their duties, they feel the
weight of their citizenship, and take pleasure in sowing the seeds of upright-
ness. Such has been the career of the subject of this brief notice. He was
born in Wooster, Ohio, on the 9th of October, 1846. His paternal grand-
father, Peter Feeman, was a native of Pennsylvania, but was an early set-
tler of Wayne county. Ohio. He was a farmer by occupation and was num-
bered among the county’s substantial citizens. He died about 1877, at the
remarkable age of one hundred years. His wife died a few years prior to
his death, also at an advanced age. The family is descended from stanch old
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669
German stock. The subject's father, John Feeman, was also a native of
the old Keystone state and was about fifteen years old when the family came
to Ohio. They located on a farm about ten miles north of Wooster, and
there the father lived until his death, which occurred in 1855. He not only
farmed, but was also an expert stone-cutter and performed much work along
that line. He was a man of exceptional character, possessed of the Chris-
tian virtues and was an inspiration to those who came in contact with him.
He married Catharine Herman, who was born in Wayne county, Ohio, in
about 1817. Her death occurred in 1907, at the age of ninety years, five
months and fourteen days. This worthy couple were the parents of eight
children, three of whom are now living, those besides the subject being Mrs.
Elizabeth Clark and Miss Sarah Feeman, both now living at Kansas City,
Missouri.
William E. Feeman received his preliminary education in the public
schools of Wooster, after which he attended Denison University, at Gran-
ville, Ohio, a Baptist college, where he studied five years. He was then a
student at the University of Wooster, graduating with the class of 1874.
Mr. Feeman was then for a year engaged as a teacher in the Reformatory at
Allegheny, Pennsylvania. In 1876 he entered the Newton Theological In-
stitute, at Newton Center, Massachusetts, the oldest Baptist educational insti-
tution in the United States, and there he graduated in 1879. In 1880 he
was called to the pastorate of the Baptist church at Ashtabula, Ohio, and
served that congregation three years, at the end of which time he accepted
the pastorate of the church at Sharpsville, Pennsylvania. At the end of two
years he was recalled to the pastorate of the Ashtabula church, which he
served for nearly six years more. During the following six years he was
pastor of the Baptist church at Lima, Ohio, followed by a two years' minis-
try at the church at Marquette, Michigan, and then three years with the
Baptist church at Hudson, Massachusetts.
In 1901, at his own option, Reverend Feeman retired from regular
ministerial work and engaged in the insurance business. His first office was
at Columbus, Ohio, but two years later he located at Lima. In 1903 he
returned to the home of his boyhood, Wooster, and conducted an insurance
and real estate office, and has there done a large amount of business in both
lines. He frequently engages in church work, when called upon, and his
addresses are invariably listened to with interest. He is a scholarly man
and his addresses are forceful and eloquent. His work while in the regular
ministry was marked by splendid results in all the churches which he served,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
numbers being added to the church and the societies being greatly blessed and
strengthened under his ministry.
During the Civil war Mr. Feeman evinced his loyalty for the old flag
by enlisting for its defense in the One Hundred and Eighty-sixth Regiment
Ohio Volunteer Infantry, with which he did valiant service for his country.
His brother, L. B. Feeman, was a member of the Sixteenth Ohio Regiment
and was killed at Jackson, Mississippi, eight days after the surrender of
Vicksburg. The subject is, because of this military service, a member of
the Grand Army of the Republic, in which he takes a deep interest. He is
a Republican in politics, as were his ancestors before him, and he gives that
party his active support. He was elected mayor of Wooster in 1909 and is
now serving efficiently in this position.
In 1880 Reverend Feeman was united in the bonds of wedlock with
Carrie V. Kramer, who was born in Indiana, the daughter of Henry Kramer,
now deceased. This union has been blessed by one child, John H. Feeman,
of Hannibal, Missouri, where he is assistant superintendent of the Ashburn
plant of the DuPont Powder Company. He married Estella Van Horn, of
Camden, New Jersey.
In every relation of life the subject has been found faithful to his trust,
and he enjoys the confidence and warm regard of all who know him.
LUCURTIS P. SIDLE.
It is a well-authenticated fact that success comes as the legitimate result
of well-applied energy, unflagging determination and perseverance in a
course of action. She smiles not on the idler or dreamer, and only the men
who have persistently sought her favor are. crowned with her blessings. In
tracing the history of Mr. Sidle it is plainly seen that the prosperity which
he enjoys has been won by commendable qualities and it is also his personal
worth which has gained for him the high esteem of those who know him.
L. P. Sidle is descended from sturdy Pennsylvania Dutch antecedents.
His paternal grandfather, William Sidle, was a native of Pennsylvania, and
was a man of great standing in his community. He was a farmer and black-
smith and also followed stockbuying on a large scale. In an earlv dav he
came to Wayne county. Ohio, and entered two hundred acres of land from
the government. Then John Sidle bought land amounting to eleven hun-
dred and sixty acres, and this land is now in the possession of the subject
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of this sketch. This worthy pioneer built a full set of farm buildings, the
residence being built in 1838 and the barn in 1848, and the substantial nature
of their construction can be judged from the fact that today these buildings
are among the best in the county. After coming to Ohio he was largely
interested in stock buying, and drove many herds of cattle from here through
to New York markets. In 1849 he caught the gold fever and he went to Cali-
fornia. He headed a party of twelve who drove overland, making the trip
without special incident, and on their arrival in the Golden state they met
with fair success in their search for the precious metal. Unfortunately,
however, for Mr. Sidle, his success was probably the cause of his death, as
the story of his death is unknown. His wife, whose maiden name was Mary
Brant, was also a native of Pennsylvania, in which state she married Mr.
Sidle and in 1818 accompanied him to their new western home. Her death
occurred some time in the sixties.
The subject’s father, John Sidle, was born in Pennsylvania August 11,
1816, and in 1818 was brought by his parents to Wayne county, Ohio, set-
tling on land in Plain township which his father had entered from the
government. Here John Sidle was reared to the life of a farmer and, fol-
lowing in his father’s footsteps, also took a decided interest in livestock,
buying cattle on an extensive scale and making a good profit in these trans-
actions. His death occurred on January 11, 1887, and m connection with
his death the following is a brief summary of an obituary notice which ap-
peared in a local newspaper at that time: “Born August 11, 1816, in York
county, Pennsylvania; died near Blachleyville, Wayne county, Ohio, January
11, 1887, aged seventy years and five months. Came to Plain township with
his father in 1818. Married March 30, 1843, to Miss Joanna Carson. In
politics he was a stanch Republican and was a candidate for representative
in 1873 against Hon. E. B. Eshelman, the Democratic candidate, and was
defeated by only eighty-one votes in a big Democratic county. The entire
community was shocked at his death.’’ The subject’s mother was born at
Potter’s Mills, Center county, Pennsylvania, February 14, 1819. When but
an infant she suffered the loss of her father, and her mother and six children
then emigrated to Wayne county, Ohio, where the mother passed away on
June 28, 1889. J°hn and Joanna Sidle were the parents of the following
children : Mary Ellen, who married a Mr. Burnett, was torn October 8,
1843, and now liyes at Shreve. this county; Lucinda J., born November 12,
1847. married a Mr. Aylesworth and lives in Wooster; James C., born Feb-
ruary 13, 1850, lives at Shreve; the subject of this sketch was the next in
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
order of birth; Clara C., born June 30, 1856, is the wife of a Mr. Gill, of
Wooster; John C., born April 25; 1859, lives in Plain township.
L. P. Sidle was born in Plain township, Wayne county, Ohio, March
14, 1852. He spent his boyhood with his parents and received a good com-
mon school education. Pie was early inured to the labors of the farm, and
to that labor he applied himself during the greater part of his active life.
He also gave much attention to the breeding and raising of livestock, in which
he was quite successful. He was a good manager and hard worker and in
1895 felt that he had earned the right to retire from active labor and enjoy
that rest which he had so richly earned. He is now residing in Wooster,
though he still retains his farm land and keeps a general oversight of its
operations.
On October 5, 1876, Mr. Sidle was united in marriage to Arelia M.
Brown, a daughter of Thomas and Mary (Bird) Brown, of Shreve, Clinton
township. She was born in Holmes county, but when ten years old she
removed to Wayne county with her parents. To Mr. and Mrs. Sidle have
been born three children: Zello is the wife of Harvey L. Hook, an automo-
bile dealer at Muhcie. Indiana; Lula J. is the wife of Tracy C. Lyda, cash-
ier of the Pennsylvania railroad at Alliance, Ohio; Raymond C., twelve years
old, remains at home with his parents and is a student in the public schools.
The subject of this sketch is a Republican in politics and is deeply
interested in the success of his party, though he has never been an aspirant
for public office. Mr. and Mrs. Sidle and all the members of the family
are connected with the Christian church and give to the society a consistent
and liberal support. The family is held in high regard in the community
and their pleasant home is one in which a gracious and generous hospitality
is ever in evidence.
DAVID E. McILVAINE.
The best history of a community or state is the one that deals mostly with
the lives and activities of its people, especially of those who, by their own en-
deavor and indomitable energy, have forged to the front and placed them-
selves where they deserve the title of progressive men. In this brief review
will be found the record of a member of an old and highly honored family,
the members of which since the early days have outstripped many of their
less ambitious contemporaries who have been content to live commonplace
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lives. This family have won a reputation in the agricultural affairs of the
county which they have assisted in placing in the front rank of the leading
farming sections of the Union.
David E. Mcllvaine, the youngest son of George Mcllvaine, was born in
this county. May 26, 1866. For a history of his father and ancestry on both
sides the reader is directed to the sketch of Daniel W. Mcllvaine, on another
page of this work. David E. Mcllvaine was educated in the home township
and the Ada Normal, also spent two years in the University of Wooster. He
was a very studious lad and received a good education, but upon the death of
his father it became necessary for him to leave school. He then taught for a
year, after which he took up general farming, not finding teaching exactly to
his liking. He began on a part of the old home place where he has since lived
and made a success of agricultural pursuits, being a very diligent worker and
a careful manager. He raises some good stock and poultry, and he has a com-
fortable dwelling and such outbuildings and farming machinery as his needs
require.
Mr. Mcllvaine was married in 1896 to Belle Irvin, daughter of Rev.
George Irvin, a popular minister, of Golden Corners, and to this union the
following children have been born : Donald I., Ruth E.. Mary K., Wallace J.,
Doris 1., Grace and Gail (twins) and an infant, born May 19, 1910.
In politics Mr. Mcllvaine is a faithful Democrat. He has taken con-
siderable interest in local affairs, and served one year as township assessor and
as trustee for three terms; he has held other smaller offices, all with a fidelity
and ability that has won the approval of all concerned. In the fall of 1906
he was elected county commissioner, and so well did he discharge the duties
of the same that in 1908 he was re-elected and is now serving in that capacity.
Religiously, Air. Mcllvaine is a member of the Presbyterian church, and his
wife belongs to the Dunkard church.
Rev. George Irvin, father of Mrs. Mcllvaine, was born in Fayette county,
Pennsylvania, in 1818, in which county his parents, who were natives of Ire-
land. settled in an early day, following the pursuit of farming. George Irvin
attended the common schools and on attaining mature years learned the trade
of a carpenter. After following that for a time, he went to farming, and
about forty years ago he came to Wayne county, Ohio. He was a local
preacher of the Dunkard church, holding membership with the Chippewa con-
gregation in Canaan township. Politically, he was a stanch supporter of the
Republican party. He was married twice, the first time to Lydia Carver, of
Canaan township, to which union were born eleven children, two of whom are
living. His second union was to Isabel Garver, a cousin of his first wife, and
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to them were born four children. Flora, George, Belle and Joseph, all of whom
are living in Canaan township excepting George, who lives in Indiana. George
Irvin died in April, 1892. and his widow now makes her home with one of her
daughters in Milton township, this county.
HENRY A. HALLER.
A member of an old and honored pioneer family of Wayne county, Ohio,
is Henry A. Haller, who has spent his life in his native community, where
he has made a success by reason of his close application to his chosen line
of work and has at the same time maintained the good reputation of his
ancestors. His birth occurred in Wooster on June 20, i860. His father was
David Haller, a native of Wurtemburg, Germany, born December 15, 1829,
who came to American when a young man and, believing that the then new
country of the Middle West held the best opportunities for him, made his
way to the interior, locating at Wooster, Ohio. Here he engaged extensively
in gardening, having learned that occupation in his native land. He was a
hard worker and made a good living for his family, spending the remainder
of his life here, dying October 9, 1889. In Germany he married Dora Ebin-
ger, also a native of Germany, who came to America with him and here
did her full share in getting a start in a new country. She died December
5, 1888. They were the parents of five children, namely: Charles, of Chi-
cago; Henry A., of this review; Fred is in the employ of John McSweeny;
Albert, deceased; Robert, deceased.
Henry A. Haller received his education in the common schools of Woos-
ter, gaining a very serviceable education in the primary branches. Early in
life, while casting about for a profession, he decided upon the baker's trade,
which he accordingly took up and followed very successfully for a period
of twenty years. He then launched in the grocery business, which he con-
ducted at intervals for ten years. He is now living in retirement, having
during his years of industry laid by a competency to insure his old age free
from want, having a comfortable and neatly kept home on West Liberty
street. He gives some attention to fine driving horses, of which he is very
fond and in which he deals.
Mr. Haller was married in 1889 to Clara Brunter, a native of Wooster
and the daughter of George Brunter, her people being well known here.
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To this union one son was born, Glen, now sixteen years old, who graduated
from the local high school with the class of 1910..
Mr. and Mrs. Haller belong to the Christ Evangelical church. In poli-
tics the former is a Democrat. He has ably served his city as assistant super-
intendent of streets and paving, during which time many important improve-
ments were made. He belongs to the Knights of Pythias, having been an
active member of the same for a period of twenty-five years, having passed
all the chairs in the local lodge. He is favorably known both in lodge and
church circles.
WILLIAM E. HELLER, D. D. S.
Among the esteemed citizens of Orrville, Ohio, is Dr. William E. Heller,
who for several years has been one of the representative dental practitioners
of this city, and who, though comparatively young in years, gives promise
of becoming one of the leading men of his profession in this part of the
state. Dr. Heller was born in Orrville, Ohio, and is a son of W. O. and
Sophia (Menschung) Heller, both of whom were also born at Orrville. On
both ancestral lines the subject is descended from sturdy German ancestry
and in him are evidenced those sterling qualities which have made the Ger-
mans such a desirable element in our great cosmopolitan population. W. O.
Heller is a machinist by trade and is a man who enjoys the confidence and
respect of all who know him. He is the father of four children, all of whom
reside at home.
Doctor Heller received his education in the public schools of Orrville,
and on the completion of his literary education he determined to adopt the
practice of dentistry as his life work. To prepare himself for his profession,
he entered the dental department of the Western Reserve University in 1902,
graduating therefrom in 1905. In 1901 he took up the practice of dentistry
with Doctor Yager at Orrville, and has since continued with him. The con-
venient and well-equipped offices are located in the Griffith block and the
Doctor is already in command of a good practice. He is eminently qualified,
both by natural aptitude and professional training, for his work and is meet-
ing with splendid success.
Doctor Heller is an appreciative member of the Free and Accepted
Masons and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and in the first-named
order he has taken all the degrees up to and including those of Knight Tem-
plar in the York rite, while in the Scottish rite he has attained to the thirtv-
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second degree, being also a Noble of the Mystic Shrine. He takes a healthy
interest in public affairs, but has no desire for public office or distinction,
being of that modest temperament which does not seek self-preferment.
JAMES A. HAMILTON.
It is a well-recognized fact that the most powerful influence in shaping
and controlling public life is the press. It reaches a greater number of people
than any other agency and thus has always been and, in the hands of per-
sons competent to direct it, always will be a most important factor in molding
public opinion and shaping the destiny of the nation. The gentleman to
a brief review of whose life these lines are devoted is prominently connected
with the journalism of northern Ohio, and at this time is editor of the Cres-
cent, published at Orrville, one of the most popular papers in Wayne county,
comparing favorably with the best local sheets in this section of the state in
news, editorial ability and mechanical execution. The county recognizes in
Mr. Hamilton not only one of the keenest newspaper men, but also a repre-
sentative citizen, whose interest in all that affects the general welfare has
been of such a character as to win for him a high place in the confidence and
esteem of the people.
Mr. Hamilton is descended from sturdy old Pennsylvania stock, his
father, William W. Hamilton, having been born in Juniata county, that
state, in 1817. For nearly fifty years he was a well-known resident of this
part of Ohio and stood high in the esteem of all who knew him. He died in
Wooster on the 8th of March, 1875. In his youth he went to New Lisbon,
Ohio, and there learned the trade of wagon-making and to this line of work
he applied himself for several years. Eventually he entered the hotel busi-
ness at New Lisbon, and for many years was a well-known boniface, his
hotel being a popular stopping place for the traveling public. He was a
Democrat in political faith, took an active part in the local councils of his
party and for a num1>er of years he served as justice of the peace. In 1862
he removed to Wooster and took charge of the United States hotel, which
he bought. Here also he was elected a justice of the peace, in which respon-
sible position he served for nine years. He was elected county auditor, and
so satisfactory were his services that he was renominated for the office, but
was defeated at the polls. He was again nominated, and this time was
elected, but died after serving four months of his last term, being at that
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time fifty-eight years old. He was a man of strong character and unimpeach-
able integrity, and in his community he exerted a wide influence, being con-
sidered at the time of his death one of the foremost citizens of the county.
He married Isabella McKnight, whose family were numbered among the
early settlers of Columbiana county, Ohio. She was born near New Lisbon,
on the 10th of September, 1813, and died a few years ago at Salem, Ohio.
James A. Hamilton was born at New Lisbon, Columbiana county, Ohio,
on the 10th of September, 1841, and is one of a family of nine children. At
the age of fourteen years he entered a printing office for the purpose of learn-
ing the trade and soon became an expert typo. He has been employed at
his trade in various sections of the Middle West. In 1859 he went to Cleve-
land, thence to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, back to Pittsburgh, Chicago, Memphis,
back to Chicago, and from the latter place went to St. Louis. There he was
employed on the Missouri Republican at the time of the strike of the printers
of that city in 1864, and while in that city he enlisted as a member of the
Missouri militia under the call of General Ewing for troops to defend St.
Louis from the raid of General Price, who approached within thirty miles
of the city. After the scare had disappeared, Mr. Hamilton returned home
and in February, 1865, he enlisted in his country’s service, becoming a mem-
ber of the Fifth Regiment Ohio Cavalry, which command he joined at Dur-
ham’s Station, North Carolina, just prior to the surrender of General Johns-
ton. Mr. Hamilton was subsequently detailed as a clerk at General Scho-
field’s headquarters, in which capacity he served several months, being mus-
tered out of the service at Columbus, Ohio, in November, 1865. The fol-
lowing year he was employed in the office of the county auditor of Wayne
county. In the spring of 1867 Mr. Hamilton resumed work at his trade on
the Wayne County Democrat. Subsequently going to Cleveland, for nearly
a year he worked on the Leader , and on the establishment of the Cleveland
News he became one of the stockholders and accepted the position of fore-
man. He continued to fill this position until the sale of the paper to the
Leader , after which he was employed on the Cleveland Herald until his
father was elected auditor of Wayne county. His prior experience in the
auditor’s office had made him of value to his father now and he was appointed
deputy auditor, filling that position for two years and eight months. W. D.
Morgan, auditor of Licking county, then secured his services in a similar
capacity for two years, after which, on the re-election of his father as auditor
of Wayne county, he again became the latter’s assistant until his death. He
then for a short time was employed as an assistant to J. J. Sullivan, auditor
of Holmes county, but on the election of Thomas J. McElhenie as auditor
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of Wavne county he was appointed that gentleman’s deputy and served two
years as such. At the end of this period of service he returned to the news-
paper business and bought an interest in the Leetonia Reporter , and during
his connection with that paper he gained a flattering reputation as an editor.
While residing at Leetonia he was a delegate to the first national conven-
tion of the Knights of Labor, which met at Reading, Pennsylvania, in Jan-
uary, 1878. In this great meeting, Mr. Hamilton was the second presiding
officer. He was still further honored by being made chairman of the ritual
committee and he drew the diagrams of signs and grips and wrote the words
that accompanied them. Selling his interest in the Leetonia Reporter , Mr.
Hamilton was employed about two years on the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. In
October, 1879, he purchased the Orndlle Crescent , which he has since con-
ducted with much editorial ability and gratifying financial success.
Mr. Hamilton has served as treasurer of Greene township and has fre-
quently represented his party as a delegate in conventions. While residing
in Leetonia he served as village clerk and was at one time the joint nominee
of the Democrats and Greenbacks for auditor of Columbiana county. He
ran considerably ahead of this ticket, though defeated by a small majority.
Socially Mr. Hamilton is a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fel-
lows, having risen to the degree of a Patriarch Militant, and has served
as grand herald of the grand lodge of Odd Fellows. He is also a member of
the Knights of Pythias and Grand Army of the Republic, being a past officer
in each of the organizations. In the fall of 1908 he was elected infirmary
director.
Mr. Hamilton has twice been married, first to Hattie, daughter of Alan-
son Ney, of Perrysbutgh, Ohio, who died leaving one child, Harry Given.
In October, 1878, he was married to his present wife, Lucy, daughter of
Christian Silver, of near Wooster, who has borne him three children, Gail*
Georgia and James.
Mr. Hamilton takes a keen interest in the public welfare and all move-
ments of a beneficent nature meet with his warm approval and endorsement.
He has ever been fully alive to the progressive spirit of the times and occu-
pies an enviable standing in the community where he has spent so many
useful years.
A. A. BROOKS, M. D.
Not only in Orrville but in the surrounding country Doctor Brooks is
known as a successful and skilled physician and surgeon, one who has given
years of thought and painstaking preparation to his profession and who is
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thoroughly qualified for its practice. Nature endowed him with the qualities
necessary for success as a practitioner, for he is sympathetic, patient and
thoughtful, and in the hour of extremity is cool and courageous. Though his
practice has always engrossed much of his attention, he has always found
time to keep posted upon the practical details in the improvements in the sci-
ence and avails himself of every development in remedial agencies. For
many years he has ministered to the sick and suffering here and has always
maintained an irreproachable character, worthy of respect and emulation.
Doctor Brooks has in his veins the blood of two strong and virile peo-
ples, being Scotch through his paternal ancestry and Irish on the maternal
side. His father was Samuel Brooks, who was born in Connecticut, but, at
the age of four years, was brought by his parents to Ohio. They located
near the city of Cleveland, where the father followed farming during the
remainder of his life. He died on the 6th of September, 1863, at the com-
paratively early age of forty-eight years. He was a man of many splendid
personal qualifications and enjoyed the respect of all who knew him. He
married Caroline Rathburn, who was born and reared near Cleveland. Her
death occurred in January, 1908, at the advanced age of eighty-nine years,
she having survived her husband forty-five years. This worthy couple were
the parents of six children, of whom the following survive : Emma J. Ham-
ilton, of Kansas City, Missouri; John H., of Cleveland, Ohio; Hamilton J.,
of Cleveland, and the subject of this sketch.
A. A. Brooks spent his boyhood days under the parental roof-tree and
secured his education in the Cleveland public schools, graduating from the
high school, and then he was for a time a student in the Brooklyn Acad-
emy. Having decided to make the practice of medicine his life work, he
entered the Cleveland Homeopathic Hospital College, remaining there until
1882, when he graduated with the coveted degree of Doctor of Medicine.
Immediately after his graduation, Doctor Brooks came to Orrville and en-
tered upon the active practice of his profession, in which he has continued
to the present time. He enjoys the distinction of having been in the con-
tinuous practice here longer than any other physician and during all these
years he has enjoyed the confidence and esteem of the people. He has been
to a remarkable degree successful in his treatment of disease and enjoys a
large and lucrative practice. In the line of his profession, he is connected
with the Eastern Ohio Homeopathic Medical Society and the American In-
stitute of Homeopathy. Thus, through connection with other members of
the profession, through the discussion of means and methods of promoting
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their work and its effectiveness, as well as through individual study, reading
and investigation, Doctor Brooks has kept steadily in touch with the progress
which has made great changes in medical practice since he first located in
Orrville, thus rendering his efforts much more effective in producing the
desired result of lessening pain and restoring health. He conducts the gen-
eral practice of medicine and surgery and has handled successfully many
extremely difficult cases. During the past ten years Doctor Brooks has served
faithfully and efficiently as health officer of Orrville.
In 1882 Doctor Brooks was united in marriage to Belle Worth, a daugh-
ter of Andrew Worth, she having been born and reared near Cleveland, in
the public schools of which city she received her education. To this union
was born a son, Robert A. On June 26, 1907, the Doctor married Blanch
M. Steel, of Orrville, daughter of Reuben and Julia A. Steel, both natives
of Ohio. Socially and in a business way the Doctor is a man to make friends,
and they are legion, not confined to his home in Orrville, but all over the
country where bis professional labors have called him.
FRANK LI X WARREN GEORGE.
Few men of Wayne county were as widely and favorably known as the
late Franklin W. George, of Congress township, whose death occurred in
1900. He was one of the strong and influential citizens whose lives have
become an essential part of the history of this section of the state and for years
his name was synonymous for all that constituted honorable and upright man-
hood. Tireless energy, keen perception and honesty of purpose, combined
with every-day common sense, were among his chief characteristics and while
advancing individual success he also largely promoted the moral and material
welfare of his community. His death was considered a distinct loss to the
community and his memory is held sacred by all who knew him.
Franklin W. George was a native son of the old Buckeye state, having
been born in Wayne county on the 14th of July, 1839, and was the son of
Andrew and Maria (Frazier) George, the former of whom was a native of
Columbiana county, Ohio, and the latter of York county, Pennsylvania. Each
came to Wayne county single and w ere married here. Andrew' George was a
farmer by vocation and was successful in his business affairs, owning about
two hundred and twenty-five acres in Congress township. He was a stanch
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Republican in his political views and in religion was affiliated with the United
Brethren church. Mr. and Mrs. George were the parents of two sons.
The subject of this sketch was educated in the common schools of Canaan
township and was reared to the life of a farmer. In young manhood he entered
a store in Burbank in the capacity of clerk, but the condition of his health be-
came so precarious that he deemed it expedient to return to an outdoor life,
and resumed work on his father’s farm, in connection with which he ran a
threshing machine a number of years. He gave his attention to general farm-
ing, raising all the crops common to this section of the country, and in con-
nection therewith he engaged in the raising of livestock, in both of which
lines he was distinctively successful. He occupied a prominent and influential
position in the community and for a number of years rendered signal service
to his fellow citizens in the capacity of township trustee, giving to the dis-
charge of the duties of the office a careful and discriminating administration.
His death occurred on the 5th of September, 1900. He was a Republican in
his political views and kept in close touch with the current events of the day.
He was public-spirited in his attitude toward all movements looking to the
betterment of the community and could be counted upon to encourage all
moral, educational or religious movements.
On the 5th of October, 1876, Mr. George was united in marriage with
Anna E. McCoy, who, after her husband's death, removed to Burbank, where
she now resides. She is the owner of one hundred and sixty-eight acres of
land, to which she gives her attention, being a woman of good business abil-
ity and sound judgment. She was born in New Pittsburg, Wayne county,
Ohio, August 13, 1844, and is a daughter of David and Nancy (Reed) McCoy.
Her father was bom in Pennsylvania and came to Wayne county in an early
day, and there married, his wife being a native of this county. Mrs. George’s
maternal grandparents, Andrew and Sarah Reed, were natives of Ireland, and
emigrated to America in an early day, their first child being born at sea. They
were the parents of twelve children, the last of whom died in June, 1900.
Mrs. George suffered the loss of both parents when she was quite young and
she was reared bv an aunt in Wayne township. Mr. and Mrs. George became
the parents of one son, Charles F., who died in infancy.
Mrs. George is a woman of many fine personal qualities and in her home
community she enjoys the warm regard and esteem of all who know her.
She is a woman of kindly ways and winning disposition and delights in the
companionship of her friends, who are in number as her acquaintances.
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GEORGE H. IRVIN, M. D.
Professional success results from merit. Frequently in commercial life
one may come into possession of a lucrative business through inheritance or
gift, but in what are known as the learned professions advancement is gained
only through painstaking and long-continued effort. Prestige in the healing
art is the outcome of strong mentality, close application, thorough mastery of
its great underlying principles and the ability to apply theory to practice
in the treatment of diseases. Good intellectual . training, thorough profes-
sional knowledge and the possession ar\d utilization of the qualities and at-
tributes essential to success, have made the subject of this review eminent in
his chosen calling and he stands today among the front ranks of physicians
in a county noted for the high order of its medical talent.
Dr. George H. Irvin is descended on the paternal side from Irish ante-
cedents and on the maternal from German stock. His maternal great-grand-
father, Philip Hoff, was a native of Germany and came to America in
young manhood, he having apprenticed himself to a blacksmith in order to
secure his passage. He lived in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, for awhile
and in 1819 he came to Wayne county, Ohio, making the trip from Penn-
sylvania in a covered Wagon. This old wagon is now the property of the
subject and is a highly prized heirloom. David Hoff, son of Philip and the
subject’s grandfather, was born in 1819 but a few weeks after his parents
had settled in Wayne county. He continued to reside on his native farm
continuously until about eight years ago, when he removed to Smithville,
and three years later came to Orrville, where he now resides. He was
ninety years old the 17th of June, 1909. He married Sarah Schaffer, who
was a tailoress and it is a matter of fact that she made her husband's wedding
clothes. Their only child, Sarah, was the subject’s mother.
The subject’s paternal grandfather was George Irvin, a earnest and
faithful minister of the German Baptist church, who lived near Golden Cor-
ners, Wayne county, Ohio, and who died at the age of seventy years. His
son, David M., the subject’s father, was born in Wayne county, but is now
a subject of Canada, having gone to Osage, Canada, five years ago and tak-
ing up farming and the real estate business. He married Sarah Hoff, who
was born and reared on the old homestead in Wayne county. Her death oc-
curred when her son, George H., was but eighteen days old. She had borne
her husband four children, namely: Mary, who was the wife of T. E.
Steiner, is deceased, leaving one child; John resides on the old home farm;
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Minnie is the wife of Chauncey J. King, of Orrville, and the subject. Sub-
sequently the father married Rebecca Kurtz, of Wooster, by whom he also
had four children : Augusta, who became the wife of Dr. Joseph S. Steiner,
of Bluffton, Ohio; Rebecca, the wife of Elmer Close, living near Orrville;
Ira, of Iowa; Anna, the wife of Isaiah Close, of near Orrville.
George H. Irvin received his elementary education in the common
schools and two years in the Orrville schools. He then became a student in
Juniata College, at Huntington, Pennsylvania, where he graduated in the
English course in 1894. He was then engaged for two years as a school
teacher at Wapakoneta, Ohio, and three years at Orrville. In the autumn
of 1899 he took up the serious study of medicine, for which he had a de-
cided liking, entering the Cleveland Homeopathic Medical College, where he
graduated in 1903. During his last year in college he was house physician at
the Cleveland Maternity Hospital and then spent nine months in the Huron
Street Hospital, both of these positions being gained by competitive examina-
tion. In 1904 Doctor Irvin came to Orrville and entered upon the active
practice of his profession. Thus far his career has been all and more than
his most sanguine friends predicted. His ability to trace the devious paths
of disease through the human system and to remove its effects is widely rec-
ognized and a mind well disciplined by severe professional training, together
with a natural aptitude for close investigation and critical research, have
peculiarly fitted him for the noble calling in which he is engaged. He is a
careful reader of the best professonal literature and keeps himself in touch
with the age in the latest discoveries pertaining to the healing art. Those
qualities of mind and heart that do not pertain to the mere knowledge of
the medical .science, but greatly enhance the true worth of the family phy-
sician, are not wanting in him. He possesses the tact and happy faculty
of inspiring confidence on the part of his patients and their friends and in
the sick room his genial presence and conscious ability to cope successfully
with disease under treatment are factors that have contributed much to the
enviable standing which he has attained*
In September, 1900, Doctor Irvin was married to Letitia Bechtel, of
Huntington, Pennsylvania, who died October 31, 1901, without issue. In
September, 1905, he married Anna Price, a daughter of W. H. Price, a well-
known resident of Norwalk, Ohio, where she was born and reared. This
union was first blessed by the birth of one child, Catharine Sarah, and on
November 21, 1909, Mrs. Irvin presented her husband with a fine pair of
twin boys, George Hoff, Jr., and Albert Price, of whom the Doctor feels
justly proud.
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Doctor Irvin is a member of the Eastern Ohio Homeopathic Society, the
Ohio State Homeopathic Society and the American Institute of Homeopathy.
He is a member of the German Baptist church and, though his professional
work precludes a very regular attendance upon religious worship, he gives
the society a generous support. He is found on the right side of every
moral movement and as a man is held in the highest regard by all who know
him.
ISAAC PONTIUS.
The record of an honorable, upright life is always read with interest,
and it better perpetuates the name of the subject than does a monument,
seen by few and soon crumbling into dust beneath the relentless hand of
time. Those who have fought and suffered for the country in which their
lot is cast are especially deserving of an honored place in its annals, and
their posterity will turn w'ith just pride to these records of the preservers
of a prosperous, united nation.
The subject of this sketch is descended from good old German ances-
try, his Hessian forefathers having settled in the state of New York many
years prior to the war for independence, and from there removed to Penn-
sylvania, where they lived for several generations. The subject’s paternal
grandfather was Nicholas Pontius, who was born in Union county, Penn-
sylvania. He was a farmer by vocation and cleared his farm from the
primeval forests. His son Frederick, father of the subject, was also born
on the homestead farm in the Keystone state and was brought to Stark
county, Ohio, When a boy. He wras reared to the life of a farmer and se-
cured his education under a private tutor. In 1852 he removed to Summit
county, this state, and remained there until 1864, when he came to Orrville,
Wavne county, and engaged in the tanning business .for a short time. His
death occurred in 1872, at the age of about seventy years. He mar-
ried Mary Ann Wise, a native of Stark county, Ohio, but whose parents
were born in Union county, Pennsylvania, being also of Pennsylvania-Ger-
man stock. Her death occurred in 1877, when she was fifty-seven years old.
In religion the father was a member of the Reformed church, while his wife
belonged to the Methodist Episcopal church. They were the parents of eight
children, of whom the following now survive: Jefferson, of Orrville: Mrs.
J. F. Seas, of Orrville; Mrs. Hal Perkins, of Moss Point, Mississippi, and
the subject.
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Isaac Pontius was reared on the home farm in Stark county, Ohio,
until he was eighteen years of age. He received a common school educa-
tion and supplemented this by attendance at the Greensburg (Ohio) Sem-
inary. At the age mentioned he enlisted in Company A, One Hundred and
Fourth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He enlisted in August, 1862,
and served until the close of the war, and during this period he participated
in a number of hard-fought battles, besides many lighter engagements and
skirmishes. He saw much arduous service and received an honorable dis-
charge.
After the close of his military service Mr. Pontius returned to Orrville
and for a short time worked with his father in the latter's tannery. In
1865 he entered the hardware store of J. F. Seas in the capacity of sales-
man and has been identified with this house continuously since, a period of
forty-four years. In 1875 ^r* Pontius engaged in the coal business, which
he still conducts. He has been a member of the Orrville Banking Company
since its organization in May, 1881, and on its re-organization as a national
bank he was elected the vice-president, which position he still retains, being
also a member of the board of directors. He has also large landed interests
and is identified as a stockholder in several local enterprises, including the
Millersburg and Wooster Telephone Company. He has given his support
and encouragement to every enterprise that has promised to be of definite
benefit to the community and is accounted one of the leading men of the
city.
On the 1 8th of October, 1876, Mr. Pontius married Martha E. Tag-
gart, the daughter of James N. and Elizabeth (Kimberlin) Taggart. She
was born, reared and married on a farm located about two miles southwest
of Orrville. Her mother was a native of Pennsylvania, while her father
was a native of Wayne county, Ohio. Her grandfather, who was born in
Dublin, Ireland, came to this country and entered land in Washington county,
Pennsylvania, subsequently coming to Wayne county, Ohio, where he ob-
tained a government patent to three-quarters of a section of good land.
On this land a large part of the business and residence section of Orrville
now lies, including the lot on which the subject of this sketch erected his
present residence in 1876. To Mr. and Mrs. Pontius has been born one
child, Howard Taggart, born September 19, 1893.
In 1896 Mr. Pontius was elected a member of the Orrville board of
education, in which position he served continuously six years, part of the time
as president of the board, and in 1907 he was again elected to this position
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and is now a member of the board. He was also a member of the city coun-
cil for six years, from 1884 to 1890. He is now a member of the Board of
Industry, an organization for the advancement of the commercial and indus-
trial interests of the city, and he is now serving as a member of the executive
committee of this organization. He exerts a large influence and is consid-
ered a desirable man to have back of any movement for the betterment of the
community.
In politics Mr. Pontius is a Democrat, though he does take a very
active part in party politics, looking beyond party lines in local elections
and taking the broad-gauge view that the best interests of the community
demand that the very best men shall be chosen for the offices. Mrs. Pontius
attends the Presbyterian church and takes a deep interest in its various activ-
ities. His present prosperity is the outcome of earnest and diligent effort,
guided by sound judgment, and he occupies an enviable standing in the com-
munity because of his sterling qualities of character.
T. E. RICE.
There is no nation that has contributed to the complex makeup of our
American social fabric an element of more sterling worth and of greater value
in supporting and fostering our national institutions than has Germany.
From this source our republic has had much to gain and nothing to lose.
Germany has given us men of sturdy integrity, indomitable perseverance,
higher intelligence and much business sagacity, — the result being the incor-
poration of a strong and strength-giving fibre ramifying through Avarp and
woof. A man who may well look with pride upon his German-American
origin is the subject of this review, who is a representative of one of the
pioneer families of Wayne county, where he has passed practically his entire
life, and where he is personally recognized as a representative citizen, having
attained a gratifying success in his business operations and occupying an en-
viable standing in the community because of his personal worth as a man.
T. E. Rice was born at Cedar Valley, Wayne county, Ohio, on the
26th of January, 1874, and is the son of Thomas and Susan (Pfeiffer) Rice.
His father was a native of Pennsylvania, though of sturdy German stock, his
parents having emigrated to America directly from Switzerland, and settling
in the Keystone state. Thomas Rice came to Wayne county, Ohio, in 1840,
and lived here during the remaining years of his life, his death occurring in
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1894, at which time he was sixty-three years of age. He was here engaged
in the saw-mill business, in which he was fairly successful. He was widely
known throughout this and adjoining counties and was a highly respected
citizen. Susan Pfeiffer Rice was born in Wayne county, where her parents
settled a short time prior to her birth. They were farming folk and lived
at Cedar Valley, Chester township, during the remainder of their lives. The
old home is still in the family, and is occupied by the subject's mother, who
is now seventy-five years old. To Thomas and Susan Rice were born six
children, briefly mentioned as follows: C. C., of Lonoke, Arkansas; Mrs.
Dr. W. H. Winkle, of Apple Creek, Ohio; Mrs. Emma Strauss, of Wooster,
Ohio; Mrs. William Craven, of Cedar Valley, Ohio; Mrs. H. W. Berry, of
Cedar Valley : the subject of this sketch is the youngest of the family.
Mr. Rice was reared to young manhood on the paternal homestead, and
received his education in the common schools. At the age of fourteen years
he entered the drug store of his brother-in-law, Dr. W. H. Winkle, at Apple
Creek, where he remained seven and a half years. He was a careful sales-
man, took a healthy interest in his work and finally decided to make that
his life work. To this end, he entered the Ohio Northern University, at
Ada, where he pursued the pharmaceutical course, and subsequently took the
examination before the state board of pharmacy, being granted a certificate.
He then clerked in a drug store at Sherodsville, Ohio, where he remained
about a year and a half. He then came to Orrville and purchased of C. D.
Swan the drug store which he now owns. He has been very successful in
this enterprise and has enjoyed his full share of the public patronage. He
carries a full line of drugs and pharmaceutical goods, as well as all the lines
generally to be found in an up-to-date drug store. He is accommodating in
his dealings with the public and his honesty and fair dealing has won for
him the confidence and good will of all who have had dealings with him.
Mr. Rice has also engaged in the piano business, having a separate store room
devoted to this line, and in this enterprise, too, he has achieved a distinctive
success. He carries a splendid line of instruments and has placed a large
number of them in the homes of this city and surrounding country. He
has other mercantile interests, being a stockholder in the Orrville National
Bank and the Cyclone Drill Company, as well as other investments, which
return to him a fair income. He takes a commendable interest in local pub-
lic affairs, and has rendered valuable service to this city as a member of the
board of public works.
On November 8, 1899, Mr. Rice took unto himself a helpmeet in the
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person of Maud P. Miller, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. L. C. Miller, both
of whom were natives of Wayne county, Ohio, and are now residing at
Orrville, where Mrs. Rice was born. One son has been born to this union,
Belmont.
Socially Mr. Rice is an appreciative member of the Free and Accepted
Masons, and he and his wife are members of the Presbyterian church, to
which they give an earnest and generous support. Mr. Rice and family are
well known in the community and their home has a reputation for hospitality.
He is one of the leading business men and public-spirited citizens of the com-
munity and is held in the highest regard.
EDMOND Z. FLUHART.
The biographies of enterprising men, especially of good men, are instruc-
tive as guides and incentives to others. The examples they furnish of stead-
fast purpose and inflexible integrity strongly illustrate what is in their power
to accomplish. Some men belong to no exclusive class in life; apparently
insurmountable obstacles have in many instances awakened and developed
their faculties and served as a stimulus to carry them to ultimate success. The
instances of success in the face of adverse circumstances would almost seem
to justify the conclusion that self-reliance with ordinary opportunities can
accomplish any reasonable object. The gentleman whose life history is here
briefly outlined has lived to good purpose and achieved a definite success in
life. By a straightforward and commendable course he has made his way to
a respectable position in the world, winning the esteem and admiration of his
fellow citizens and earning the reputation of an enterprising man of affairs
which the public has not been slow to recognize and appreciate.
Edmond Z. Fluhart was born in Saltcreek township, Wayne county,
Ohio, February 9, 1853. His paternal grandfather, Zacheus Fluhart. was a
native of Pennsylvania, and emigrated from Meadville, that state, to Wayne
county, in a very early day, accompanying his parents. The father bought a
tract of land that had just been entered by a prior comer and he at once en-
tered upon the task of clearing the land and developing a farm, in which he
succeeded with the help of his sons. Zacheus married and reared a family
and here his death occurred. Among his sons was James H., the father of
the subject. James H. was born in 1825 in Saltcreek township and was reared
to the life of a farmer, which vocation he followed all the days of his life.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
689
On reaching manhood’s years he married Margaret Poorman, who was born
in Pennsylvania, coming from that state to Ohio with her parents when she
was but seven years old. She experienced the novelty of walking almost the
entire distance, as did the other members of the family, their only convey-
ance, a light one-horse wagon, being used to carry the household furniture.
They first located at Wooster, which at that time consisted of but one store
and a few houses. Here she met James Fluhart and they were married on Jan-
uary 22, 1849, the ceremony being celebrated in the Presbyterian church at
Fredericksburg. To them were born seven children, namely: George, de-
ceased ; Albert, deceased ; Edmond Z. ; Mary E., who died in infancy ; Thomas
Willard, deceased; James Finley, deceased; Nettie, who married a Mr. Cris-
well. James Fluhart followed farming all his life and was numbered among
the successful men of the township. He was a Republican in politics and was
active in local public affairs, but was never an office seeker. By dint of much
hard work and good management he accumulated two hundred and fifty acres
of fine land, which he cultivated with eminent success. His religious affilia-
tion was with the Presbyterian church at Fredericksburg, in which he took a
prominent place. He was sixty-eight years old at the time of his death, and
in his passing away the entire community felt that it had suffered a distinct
loss.
Edmond Z. Fluhart has lived on the farm where he now resides since
he was seven years old and he secured a fair education in the common schools
of the neighborhood. His youthful days, when out of school, were required
in the work on the farm, and during all his life he has remained a tiller of the
soil. He is a good manager and a progressive worker, keeping in close touch
with every detail of his work, so that everything he does is characterized by
completeness in detail. The farm is nicely kept up, its general appearance in-
dicating the owner to be a man of excellent taste and sound judgment. He
has followed general farming and in connection has raised considerable live-
stock, being successful in everything he undertakes.
In politics Mr. Fluhart has been an uncompromising Republican and has
done much to advance the interests of his party in this locality. He has not
been a seeker after office or public preferment, but has rendered efficient ser-
vice as school director. Religiously Mrs. Fluhart is a member of the Lutheran
church at Fredericksburg. Mr. Fluhart is not a member of the church, but
gives liberally to its support.
Mr. Fluhart was united in marriage to Lucy Graber, of Maysville, Salt-
creek township, this county, a daughter of John Graber, who was a native of
Germany. She was born February 14, 1868. To them have been born the
(44)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
following children : Ida E., James M., Frank Blaine, Nettie Florence, George
McKinley, Margaret Alice, William Foster, Walter Lester and Joseph Homer.
Mr. Fluhart is a man of many splendid personal qualities and occupies r
deservedly high position among his fellow citizens. Among his warmest
friends are those who have known him through many years. — a fact which in-
dicates that his career has been an honorable one, and upon the pages of
Wayne county’s history appears the name of no man who is more worthy of
public regard than Mr. Fluhart.
A. J. HELLER.
1
The history of the Buckeye state is not an ancient one. It is the record
of the steady growth of a community planted in the wilderness and reaching
its magnitude of today without other aids than those of continued industry.
Each county has its share in the story and every county can lay claim to
some incident or transaction which goes to make up the history of the com-
monwealth. After all, the history of a state or county is but a record of
the doings of its people among the pioneers and the sturdy descendants oc-
cupy places of no secondary importance. The story of the plain common
people who constitute the moral bone and sinew of the state should ever at-
tract the attention and prove of interest to all true lovers of their kind. In
the life story of the subject of this sketch there are no thrilling chapters or
startling incidents, but it is merely the record of a life true to its highest
ideals and fraught with much that should stimulate the youth just starting in
the world as an independent factor.
The subject of this sketch is descended from German stock, his great-
grandfather, Peter Heller, having come from Germany to America prior
to the Revolutionary war. He was an aide on the.staff of Gen. George Wash-
ington at the battle of the Brandywine. His son, Joseph Heller, came west
and lived on a farm between Lancaster and New Holland, Pennsylvania,
where he owned a farm. He built, entirely at his own expense, a church
on his farm and for many years paid all the running expenses of the same,
including the minister’s salary. The society was known far and wide as
Heller’s Church. At his death the property went to a board of trustees, and
when they subsequently erected a splendid new church on the same site it, too,
was known as Heller's Church, in honor of the old pioneer and benefactor.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
69I
Heller’s Station, on the Lancaster & New Holland railroad, was also named
for him. He died at the age of seventy years, and his death Was widely re-
gretted.
The subject’s father was Adam B. Heller, who was born in Lancaster
county, Pennsylvania, but who moved to Wayne county, Ohio, in 1840, set-
tling about two miles south of Orrville. He had followed farming pursuits
prior to coming to Orrville, at which time he became an employee of the
Pennsylvania Railroad Company. He did the first shifting for this company
in Orrville, the work being performed with the assistance of a horse. His
death occurred here in 1886, at the advanced age of eighty-four years. He
married Elizabeth Signer, a native of Reading, Pennsylvania, in which state
they were married. Mrs. Heller died in 1866, at the age of forty-eight
years. To this union there were born nine children, namely: Mrs. Sarah
Geyer, of Huntington, Ohio; Joseph, of Orrville; William, of Orrville; Mar-
garet, deceased; Kate, who makes her home with the subject; A. J. is the
next in order of birth; Mrs. G. R. Burdoyn, of Orrville; Isaac is a printer at
Spring Valley, Illinois, and was at one time the publisher of the News, at that
place; Frank is night yardman on the Pennsylvania railroad at Orrville.
A. J. Heller was born in the parental home within a few miles of Orr-
ville, in 1855, an<J has sPent his entire life in Wayne county. He attended
the Orrville public schools in his youth and received a fair education. After
leaving school he was employed as a clerk in a grocery store, where he re-
mained several years. He then entered the Orrville Planing Mill, but a
short time later he became foreman for the Orrville (Ohio) Champion
Thresher Company, builders of the Champion threshers. In 1885 Mr. Hel-
ler went to Auburn, New York, and took charge of the John M. Hurd Nov-
elty Works, and at the death of Mr. Hurd he closed out the business for the
estate. Returning to Orrville in 1887, he accepted a foremanship with the
Champion Thresher Company, in which position he was retained until 1891,
when he became superintendent and vice-president of the company. In No-
vember, 1907, Mr. Heller opened a real estate and insurance office in Orr-
ville, wffiich he has since conducted and in which he has been remarkably suc-
cessful. He is considered a man of splendid business ability and he possesses
an accurate knowledge of real estate values. He has handled a number of
large deals and has done much to advance the interests of the community.
He is at all times and all places a “hustler” for Orrville and his support is
solicited for every enterprise for the advancement of the town materially or
otherwise.
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Mr. Heller has served two terms as township clerk, having been first
elected as soon as he had attained his majority. He has also served two
terms as city clerk, three terms as water works trustee, during which time
he served as secretary of the board, having complete management of the
water system. His service in this relation was extremely creditable to him
as during that period he put the water department on a paying basis, regard-
less of the fact that improvements were made amounting to over six thousand
dollars. He is at the present time president of the Board of Industry, a local
organization composed of one hundred and five business men who have
banded together for the purpose of advancing the commercial and industrial
interests of Orrville. One of the popular enterprises projected by Mr. Heller
is what is known as Heller’s Allotment, on Heller avenue, a sub-division of
the town.
Mr. Heller has taken a very active interest in the Knights of Honor,
having been a charter member of Orr Lodge, at Orrville. He has passed
through all the chairs in the subordinate body and for a number of years was
a representative to the grand lodge. He was elected vice-grand dictator,
refusing the office of grand dictator, and in 1906 he was elected a representa-
tive to the supreme lodge, Knights of Honor, which position he still holds.
Politically he is a Democrat, takes an active interest in party affairs, and was
elected mayor of the city by one hundred and sixteen votes over E. P. Willi-
man. Although Mr. Heller is one of the solid, substantial men of his com-
munity, he is entirely self-made, having had scarcely any assistance in estab-
lishing himself. He is now occupying an enviable position among his fel-
low citizens and enjoys the respect of all who know him.
JOHN W. REHM.
This sterling representative of one of the pioneer families of Ohio is a
native son of Wayne county, where he was reared to maturity upon a farm,
early beginning to assume the practical responsibilities of life and lending his
aid in connection with the improvement of the old homestead. That he has
lived and labored to goodly ends is clearly indicated in the position which he
now holds in the confidence and regard of his fellow men and in the success
which has crowned his efforts as an exponent of the great basic art of agri-
culture, which has been his vocation throughout his business career.
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Mr. Rehm was born in Baughman township, Wayne county, on the 18th
of October, 1862, and is the son of George and Mary (Sickman) Rehm.
The father was born in 1838 in Pennsylvania and came to Ohio when a young
man, settling in Baughman township, where he continued to reside until his
death, which occurred in 1882, at the age of forty-four years. Mary Sickman
Rehm was a native of Baughman township, born in 1834, and her death oc-
curred in 1905, at the age of seventy-one years. Mr. and Mrs. Rehm were
the parents of the following children: John W., the subject of this sketch;
Levina, who is the wife of Fred Anthony, of Baughman township; Sarah, the
wife of Henry Fisher, of Hancock county, Ohio; George lives on the old
homestead in Baughman township; Alice is the wife of Harry Mackey, of
Baughman township; Jacob F., of the same township; Catharine N. is the
wife of Charley Shenk, of Baughman township; and Andrew J., also of the
same township.
John W. Rehm attended the schools of his native township and has
lived here all his life with the exception of five years spent in St. Joseph
county, Indiana. He was reared to the life of a farmer and has never re-
linquished that vocation, in which he has achieved a distinctive success. He
is the owner of a fine farm of one hundred and five acres located in this
township, and the condition of the place indicates the owner to be a man of
good tastes and sound judgment. He follows a general line of farming,
raising all the crops common to this latitude, and gives proper attention to
the rotation of crops and other details so essential to successful agriculture.
His farm buildings are modern and conveniently arranged and all the ma-
chinery usually found on an up-to-date farm are here used. Mr. Rehm is
now living in Orrville, where he has a fine modern home, though he contin-
ues to personally supervise the operation of his farm.
Though devoted to his own interests, Mr. Rehm has been public-spirited
enough to take an interest in public affairs and he is now serving as the treas-
urer of Baughman township. He is a Democrat in political faith and is now
a member of the county central committee from his township. He rendered
efficient service for a number of years as a member of the school board of
Baughman township and continues to take a deep and commendable inter-
est in educational matters. His social relations are with the Independent
Order of Odd Fellows. He and his wife are members of the Reformed
church at Orrville, to which they give an earnest and liberal support.
On the 9th of February, 1888, Mr. Rehm married Matilda Carbiener,
who was born in St. Joseph county, Indiana, and they are the parents of a
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
daughter, Ethel. Another child died at the age of five months. He is a man
greatly esteemed by all who have his acquaintance and exerts a wide influ-
ence in this, his native township.
ADAM W. FIKE.
The importance that attaches to the lives, character and work of the
early settlers of Wayne county and the influence they have exerted on the
cause of humanity and civilization is one of the most absorbing themes that
can possibly attract the attention of the local chronicler or historian. If
great and beneficent results — results that endure and bless mankind — are the
proper measure of the good men do, then who is there in the world's history
that may take their places above the hardy pioneers? To point out the way
and thus make possible our present advancing civilization, was the great
work accomplished by the early settlers and it is granted by all that they
builded wiser than they knew. Admit that as a rule, but few realized the
transcendent possibilities that rested upon their shoulders; that their lives,
in some instances, were somewhat narrow; that they realized but little the
great results that ultimately crowned their efforts; yet there follows the
supreme fact that they in a large measure took their lives into their own
hands, penetrated the wilderness, and with a patient energy, resolution and
self-sacrifice that stands alone and unparalleled, they worked out their allotted
tasks, accomplished their destinies and today their descendants and others
enjoy undisturbed the fruitage of their labors.
Prominent among the worthy representatives of the pioneer element in
the county of Wayne is the well-known gentleman to a review of whose life
the attention of the reader is now invited. For many years Adam W. Fike
has been a forceful factor in the growth and prosperity of Wayne township
and today he is enjoying the full confidence and high regard of all who know
him. Mr. Fike is a native of Alsace, France (now Germany), where he
was born in 1836, and he was brought to America with his parents at the
age of four years. His father, Michael Fike, was a native of the same coun-
try, but was ambitious and the New World offered him what seemed great
opportunities for the man of energy. The family were forty-one days in
crossing the Atlantic. They first went to Cleveland, but in 1839 came to
Wayne county, locating in Wayne township, near Wooster. The father pur-
chased a little later a piece of land in Canaan township and entered at once
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on the task of clearing it and rendering it fit for cultivation. Of the eighty
acres in the tract, only twelve were cleared and thus there remained a vast
amount of work to be done. Michael Fike lived on this place nearly all his
life, removing to Sandusky, Ohio, a short time before his death, spending
his last days with his youngest daughter. He was eighty-four years old at
the time of his death. He married Eve Jacobs, who also was a native of
Alsace, France, and she lived to the advanced age of ninety-one years.
Michael and Eve Fike were the parents of seven children, one of whom died
before leaving their home in France. Those now living are as follows : Fred-
erick, of Canaan township; Mrs. Emeline Voigt, also of Canaan township,
and the subject of this sketch.
Adam \Y. Fike was the youngest of his father's sons and he was reared
on the home farm, securing his education in the schools of the township,
which were in that early day somewhat primitive in equipment and methods.
In his young manhood he began teaching school, and taught four terms dur-
ing the winter seasons, devoting his attention to the farm work in summers.
He possessed strong musical talent and did some teaching along that line.
Upon reaching manhood’s years he applied himself to farming, in connec-
tion with which he did considerable dealing in stock, in both vocations meet-
ing with success. After his marriage he moved to a farm he owned in Wayne
township, and remained there until 1892, when he removed to the town of
Orrville, where he has since resided. He is now permitted to enjoy that rest
which he has so richly earned, though his is not a life of idleness, as he con-
tinues to keep a supervision over the various properties which he owns. He
owns two splendid farms in Wayne township, one farm in East Union town-
ship, ninety acres contiguous to Orrville, property at Madisonburg and Ca-
naan, several residence properties in Orrville, in addition to which he owns
the largest and finest business block in Orrville, known as the Fike Memorial
block. He platted a tract of land adjacent to Orrville, and is now selling
lots from a second plat.
Mr. Fike has twice been married, the first time to Elizabeth
May, who was born January 23, 1839, in Wayne township, this county.
To this union were born five children, namely: Herschell A., born Novem-
ber 26, 1859, and now living at Akron, Ohio; Mrs. Kate Neftzer, born Au-
gust 14, 1865 and living in Canaan township: Allie, born Au-
gust 22, 1862, died in 1864; Horatio W., born March 28, 1868, lives at Mad-
isonburg, this county; Luther, born April 21, 1870. Mrs. Elizabeth Fike died
on May 1, 1870, at the early age of thirty-one years, and Mr. Fike was sub-
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sequently married to Malissa Landis, who was born and reared in Wayne
township, and to them has been born one child, Milton M., born October 7,
1875, and now living at Canton, Ohio.
Mr. Fike has taken a keen interest in public affairs and served as jus-
tice of the peace in Wayne township for six years. He was for many years
a member of the Wayne township school board and held a number of local
offices, in all of which he performed his duties faithfully and to the satisfac-
tion of his fellow citizens. He is a man of positive religious opinions and
is a faithful member of the old Lutheran church in Wayne township. Mrs.
Fike is a member of the Lutheran church at Orrville. They both give a
cordial support to every movement that promises to benefit the community
in any way and they are well liked by all who know them.
ERVIN W. THOMPSON.
The subject of this sketch, who is the efficient and popular cashier of the
Citizens* National Bank of Wooster and a financier of much more than local
reputation, is a native of Delaware county, Ohio, and a representative of one
of the oldest and best-known families in that part of the state. The Thomp-
sons are of English stock and came to America in an early day, settling first
in Virginia, later emigrating to Delaware county. Ohio, where nearly all the
descendants of the original immigrants still live and where the subject’s ante-
cedents for three or four generations have been born. His grandfather, James
C. Thompson, a native of that county and a farmer by occupation, died in
the year 1906. Calvin Thompson, his father, who was born in the same local-
ity and is still living, is an enterprising business man of Ostrander, the place
where the family originally settled. The maiden name of Mrs. Calvin Thomp-
son was Celesta Sewell. She is a native of Lancaster, Fairfield county, Ohio,
and is also living, being the mother of four children, whose names are as fol-
lows: Harry Thompson, of Alderson, West Virginia; Calvin, of Delaware,
this state; William, who lives in the town of Alderson. and Ervin W., whose
name introduces this sketch.
Ervin W. Thompson, whose birth occurred on November 1. 1871, was
reared in his native town of Ostrander, Delaware county, and received his
educational training in the public schools. He remained under the parental
roof until twenty-three years of age, and began life for himself as a teacher,
which calling he followed for a period of four years. At the expiration of
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that time he entered upon what has proved a remarkably successful business
career, by accepting in 1903 the position of bookkeeper with the Union Bank-
ing Company of Marysville, Ohio. After serving four months in that ca-
pacity he was elected to the more honorable and responsible post of cashier
of the Union Banking Company, West Mansfield, Ohio, which he held with
credit to himself and to the satisfaction of his superiors until 1900, when he
severed his official connection with the company to help organize the Bank
of Plain City, in the town of the same name, of which he also became cashier.
Mr. Thompson took a leading part in building up the latter institution and
making it one of the most successful local banks in Madison county and
during his five years’ service as cashier added to his already welbestablished
reputation as a capable and reliable business man and forged to the front
among the enterprising financiers of central Ohio. In 1905 the Citizens’ Na-
tional Bank of Wooster was organized and in casting about for a proper person
for cashier the choice fell to Mr. Thompson, who at once resigned the post
with the bank at Plain City and took charge of the position tendered him by
the officials of the newly established institution at Wooster.
Mr. Thompson moved to the latter city in March, 1905, since which time
he has devoted his attention very closely to the interests of the bank, which
meanwhile has steadily grown in public favor, until it now ranks among the
best managed and most successful institutions of the kind in the state. His
long and eminently creditable experience as a banker has made him familiar
with the business in its every detail, and the creditable manner in which he has
discharged the duties of the several important positions with which intrusted
speaks well for his ability and for the confidence reposed in him by bank offi-
cials and the general public. Mr. Thompson has a broad and comprehensive
knowledge of monetary matters and, as already indicated, stands well to the
front in financial circles. In addition to his connection with the Citizens’ Na-
tional Bank of Wooster, of which he is an official stockholder and director,
he is also identified with several other similar institutions, being a director
and stockholder of the Farmers’ Banking Company of Sterling, Ohio, the
Farmers and Merchants' Bank at Smithville, the Union Banking Company of
West Mansfield, and the Bank of Plain City, Plain City, Ohio, in all of which
he is actively interested and to the growth and success of which he has in no
small degree contributed. He has also manifested commendable zeal in the
material advancement of his various places of residence and since becoming a
citizen of Wooster has given his aid and influence to all worthy enterprises
for the city's growth and prosperity. Though never entering the political
arena as an aspirant for public honors or leadership, he keeps in close touch
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
with the leading questions and issues before the people and as a Democrat
has rendered efficient service to his party in Wayne county and elsewhere. He
has attained to distinguished standing in the Masonic brotherhood, being a
thirty-second-degree Mason and as such is widely and favorably known among
his fellow craftsmen throughout Ohio and other states, besides being active
and influential worker in Wooster Commandery No. 48, Knights Templar,
Wooster Chapter No. 13, Royal Arch Masons, and Blue Lodge No. 33. He is
also identified with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, belonging to
Wooster Lodge No. 32, and while a resident of Plain City was initiated into
the Pythian fraternity and still holds membership with the lodge at that place.
Mr. Thompson and Ella D., daughter of S. T. Carr, of Ostrander, Ohio,
were united in the holy bonds of wedlock on September 5, 1904, the mar-
riage being without issue. Mr. and Mrs. Thompson move in the best society
circles of Wooster and are esteemed and faithful members of the Baptist
church in this city. By continued industry and careful management Mr.
Thompson has acquired a handsome competency, and not only ranks among
the financially solid men of his adopted county but also holds worthy pres-
tige as one of its representative citizens. A highly respected, honorable gen-
tleman, who has won his position in the business and social world by honesty
and integrity and whose native ability is supplemented by agreeable manners
and a pleasing presence, he fills a large place in the confidence and esteem of
the public and enjoys great popularity among the people with whom his lot
has been cast.
AMOS SANDERSON. D. D. S.
As a native son of Wayne county and a representative of one of the
earliest pioneer families in this section of the Buckeye state, Doctor San-
derson is eminently qualified to representation in a compilation which has
to do with those who have been the founders and builders of this common-
wealth. while such is his personal honor and integrity of character and such
his standing as a professional man that this consideration is all the more
compatible. Doctor Sanderson occupies an enviable position in his profes-
sion, being considered one of the leading dentists of northern Ohio. He is a
native of Franklin township, Wayne county, Ohio, where he was bom on
the 29th of March, 1864. His paternal grandfather, John Sanderson, was
a native of Pennsylvania and came to Wayne county in an early day, being
one of the first settlers of the county. Here he followed farming as a live-
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699
lihood and was a successful man, enjoying the high esteem of all who knew
him. His death occurred in about 1865. The subject's father, also named
John, was born in this county in 1817 and lived in Franklin township all his
life, a period of sixty-six years, his death occurring in 1883. He also fol-
lowed farming, and during the early days he was a noted hunter, being a
good shot with the rifle. Doctor Sanderson of this sketch is now the pos-
sessor of a pair of horns from a deer which his father killed in this county
in 1834. John Sanderson married Caroline Shaw, who died on March 4,
1904. She was born in 1833 in Tuscarawas county, Ohio, her family remov-
ing later to Wayne county. To John and Caroline Sanderson were
born the following children: Robert, who resides at Niles, Ohio; John, of
Franklin township, this county; James, a farmer living in Holmes county,
Ohio; Mary, deceased; the subject of this sketch is the next in order of
birth; Hiram, of Saltcreek township, Wayne county; Edward and Ida, both
also of Saltcreek township.
Amos Sanderson was reared on the paternal homestead, until he was
nineteen years old. He received such an education as was afforded in the
common schools, and in 1886 he took up the study of dentistry under the
direction of Doctor Cunningham, of Fredericksburg, this county, completing
his technical education by attendance at the Cincinnati College of Dental
Surgery. Immediately on his graduation, Doctor Sanderson located at Dal-
ton, where he was successfully engaged in the practice until 1906, when he
removed to Orrville. From the beginning of his professional work, Doctor
Sanderson has been stamped as a man of unusual excellence in his line and
he has almost continually commanded one of the largest practices in this part
of the state. During his residence at Dalton, Doctor Sanderson served for
five years as mayor of that town and was also justice of the peace for sev-
eral years. The Doctor has practiced a wise economy and has made a number
of shrewd and safe investments, so that today he is considered fairly well-to-
do, owning valuable property in Orrville and elsewhere.
In 1888 Doctor Sanderson married Jennie Shrimplin, now deceased, of
Holmes county, Ohio, and they became the parents of two children, Ralph
and Jennie. Some time after the death of his first wife, the Doctor married
Kilah Jones, of Shreve, this county, and they had two children, both of whom
died in infancy.
Socially, Doctor Sanderson is a member of the Free and Accepted Ma-
sons, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Knights of the Macca-
bees. In politics he is a Democrat and takes a deep interest in the success of
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
his party. Generous to a fault and social to a high degree, Doctor Sanderson
wins friends easily, and he has the happy faculty of drawing them closer to
him as the years go by. Viewed in a personal light, he is a strong man, of
excellent judgment, fair in his views and highly honorable in his relations
with his fellow men.
FRANK E. STEWART, M. D.
Among the representative professional men of Wayne county is he
whose name appears at the head of this brief review, and who sustains an
enviable reputation as one of the leading dentists in Orrville. To such men
as Doctor Stewart the writer turns with particular satisfaction as offering
in their life histories justification for works of this nature, — not that their
lives have been such as to gain them wide reputation or the admiring plaudits
of men, but that they have been true to the trusts reposed, have shown such
attributes of character as. entitle them to the regard of all, and have been
useful in their spheres of action.
F. E. Stewart was born at Marietta, Ohio, on the 22d of March, 1887,
and is a son of John and Jennie (Hutchison) Stewart. John Stewart was
also a native of Marietta, Ohio, and was a farmer, following this vocation
practically all his life, being at the same time extensively engaged in the
selling of fertilizers. He died in 1902, at the age of fifty years. The Stewart
family is of Scotch-Irish ancestry and they inherit those sterling qualities of
character which belong to those races. John and Jennie Stewart became the
parents of six children, namely: Mrs. Effie Orwig, of Zanesville, Ohio;
Mrs. Bertha Bode, of Monroe county, this state; Mrs. Grace Myers, also of
Monroe county; F. E., the subject of this sketch; Raymond, and Luna, at
home.
Doctor Stewart was reared on the home farm until he was eighteen
years of age and received his education in the common schools. Having de-
cided to take up the practice of dentistry, he, in 1905, entered the Starling
Medical College, at Columbus, Ohio, where he graduated in the spring of
1908. He first entered upon the practice of his profession at Columbus, but
in February, 1909, he came to Orrville and opened his office. He has dental
rooms on East Market street and here he is already in command of a large
and lucrative practice. He is a young man of great promise and will no
doubt command his full share of the public patronage. Possessed of those
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sterling qualities of character which commend any man, he has already won
and retains the confidence and friendship of all who have formed his acquain-
tance.
W. L. DESVOIGNES.
The gentleman to a brief review of whose life and characteristics the
reader’s attention is directed is numbered among the foremost business men
of Orrville, Wayne county, and has by his enterprise and progressive meth-
ods contributed in a material way to the commercial advancement of the city
and county. He has in the course of an honorable career been most success-
ful in the business enterprise of which he is the head, and is well deserving
of mention in the present work. Mr. DesVoignes is descended from Swiss
ancestry on the paternal side, his father, August DesVoignes, having been
born in that little republic in 1834. He came to Wayne county about sixty-
five years ago, and was one of the pioneer merchants of the county. He
first settled at Mount Eaton, where he began life as a clerk in a general store.
After working in this capacity for five years, he bought out his employer and
continued the business at that place for twenty years or more. In 1876 he
came to Orrville and established himself in the grocery business and some
time later he opened a hardware store. He was successful in his enterprises
and he continued to run the hardware store up to about 1894, when he re-
tired from active business pursuits, and has since been enjoying that rest
which he had so richly earned. During his active life he held several local
offices and always stood high in the esteem of his fellow citizens. Now, in
the golden sunset of life, he is able to look back over the vista of the years
and can feel that for him the ‘dines have indeed fallen in pleasant places.”
He is a man whose sterling qualities of character commended him to the high
regard and confidence of all with whom he had dealings and this feeling he
reciprocated by ever holding his word inviolate and treating his fellows ac-
cording to his highest conception of the right. He is a member of the Pres-
byterian church and has always been deeply interested in the moral, intel-
lectual and material development of his community.
August DesVoignes was united in marriage to Hannah Lucas, who was
a native of Wayne county, born near Mount Eaton. To this union two chil-
dren were born, a girl who died in early life, and the subject of this sketch.
W. L. DesVoignes was born at Mount Eaton. Wayne county, in 1865
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
and removed to Orrville with his parents in 1876. He received his educa-
tion in the public schools of Orrville, and supplemented this by attendance
at the Poughkeepsie Business College, at Poughkeepsie, New York, gradu-
ating from the latter institution. Eighteen years ago he established himself
in the dry goods business at Orrville and has been very successful in this
enterprise. About twelve years ago he moved into his present commodious
and well arranged store, which is located on the northeast corner of the
public square. He carries a large, complete and well-selected line of dry
goods, comprising all the lines usually carried in a first-class and up-to-date
store, and here he has received a full share of the public patronage. He
employs a large force of accommodating clerks and every effort is made to
please every customer who enters the store.
Socially Mr. DesVoignes is affiliated with the Free and Accepted Ma-
sons and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. His many admirable
qualities of head and heart have gained for him a large circle of friends,
and he is widely and favorably known in Wayne county.
J. F. SEAS.
In the death of the honored subject of this memoir, June 15, 1902, at
his home in Orrville. there passed away another member of that group of
distinctively representative business men who were the leaders in inaugurat-
ing and building up the industrial and commercial interests of Wayne and
other counties of northeastern Ohio. His name is familiar to all who have
been informed in regard to the history of this particular section of the Buck-
eye state. He was identified with the growth of Wayne county for many
years and contributed to its material progress and prosperity to an extent
equalled by few. He early had the sagacity and prescience to discern the
eminence which the future had in store for this great and growing section of
the commonwealth, and acting in accordance with the dictates of faith and
judgment, he reaped, in the fullness of time, the generous benefits which are
the just recompense of indomitable energy, spotless integrity and marvelous
enterprise. Prominently connected with the business history of Orrville,
the career of J. F. Seas is one eminently worthy of permanent record. Great-
er fortunes have been accumulated by others, but few lives furnish so striking
an example of the wide application of sound business principles and safe con-
servatism as does his. The story of his success is not long nor does it contain
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703
any exciting chapters, but in it lies one of the most valuable secrets of the
prosperity which it records ; his business and private life are replete with inter-
est <?nd incentive, no matter how lacking in dramatic action — the record of
a noble life, consistent with itself and its possibilities in every direction.
J. F. Seas was born in Stark county, Ohio, on the 9th of March, 1831,
and was a son of Henry and Gertrude Seas. These worthy parents were
both natives of Germany and the father followed the vocation of a stone-
mason, in which he was an expert workman. Mr. Seas secured a fair educa-
tion in the common schools near his boyhood home. Prior to the Civil war
Mr. Seas, believing that Orrville had a promising commercial future, went
into the hardware business in that town. His judgment was sound and he
met with gratifying success in the venture, remaining identified With this
business uninterruptedly until the date of his death, which occurred, as stated
in the first lines of this memoir, on the 15th of June, 1902. Mr. Seas’s suc-
cess was remarkable and was mainly attributable to the principles on which
the business was conducted. Honesty was one of Mr. Seas’s strong char-
acteristics and this alone gained for him the confidence of the public. And.
too, Mr. Seas possessed to a remarkable degree that intuition which guides
the successful merchant in anticipating the wants of the people. He made
every effort to accommodate those who came to deal with him and he made
a friend of every customer. Courteous in manner and obliging in disposition,
it was no wonder he succeeded in building up a trade remarkable in its size
and which remained loyal to him during the more than forty years in
which he was in active business.
Since the death of Mr. Seas the business has been conducted by his sons,
J. Fred Seas and D. Edward Seas. Mr. Seas’s death was caused by cancer,
the end coming when he was in his seventy-second year. He was married on
the 3d of January, 1865, to Mary A. Pontius, who was born in Stark county,
Ohio, September 12, 1848. They became the parents of six children, namely:
Proctor E., of Cleveland, Ohio; Almeda died in infancy; Victoria died in
young womanhood; J. Fred and D. Edward, who are now conducting the
business founded by their father; Mrs. Gertrude Baker, of Orrville. Of
these, J. Fred Seas married Margaret Santche; D. Edward married Martha
Geyer; Proctor married Margaret Altman, and they have one son, Vincent.
Mrs. Mary Pontius Seas resides on North Main street, Orrville, in the beau-
tiful and commodious home built by Mr. Seas a number of years ago. She
is a woman of gracious personality, possessing many of those pleasing qual-
ities which have endeared her to all who are acquainted with her.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Coming to Wayne county in young manhood, Mr. Seas started in busi-
ness unostentatiously and without the blare of trumpet, but through his
steady and persistent application of sound business principles he succeeded in
winning, not only financial independence, but, better still, the respect of his
fellow men. His long and honorable career as a citizen, neighbor and friend
is a precious heirloom not only to those immediately left to mourn his de-
parture, but a priceless legacy to the community at large. It is a true and
comforting fact that life is measured, not by years alone, but rather by a pur-
pose achieved, by noble deeds accredited to it. If this be true, few lives in
this community have been entitled to greater honor than that of Mr. Seas.
LYMAN R. CRITCHFIELD, JR.
Lyman R. Critchfield, Jr., one of the foremost members of the Wooster
county bar, is a native of Millersburg, Ohio, where he was born on April 17,
1868. He is a son of Hon. L. R. Critchfield. one of the ablest lawyers in
Ohio, who was at one time attorney-general of Ohio; also state senator, judge,
etc. His sketch appears elsewhere in this work. Lyman R. Critchfield’s
mother was Adelaide M. Shaffer, daughter of Dr. Moses Shaffer, a man of
great force of character and high moral and physical courage. He was espe-
cially successful as a medical practitioner at Wooster and was known for his
great skill as a surgeon. Mr. Critchfield graduated from the high school of
Millersburg in 1886 and attended the Ohio Wesleyan LTniversity at Dela-
ware, Ohio, studied law under the instruction of his father, and was associated
with him for eighteen years. He was admitted to practice before the supreme
court of Ohio at Columbus, June 4, 1891, and has followed his profession ever
since, both in Wayne and Holmes counties, having located at Wooster in
1892. As a lawyer, he is thorough and conscientious in all cases. Among one
of his important cases was that of defending Harry White, charged with the
murder of Thomas Dye, pf Orrville, a case that presented but little hope of
success. Politically, Mr. Critchfield is an ardent Democrat, and is a great
admirer of William Jennings Bryan. He served as solicitor of the city of
Wooster and has always taken an active part in the things in which his party
was most interested.
Mr. Critchfield enlisted in Company D, Eighth Regiment Ohio Volunteer
Infantry, during the war with Spain, and served from April 26, 1898, to No-
vember 2 1 st of that year, when he was mustered out with his regiment. He
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served in the expedition of Santiago de Cuba, and took part in the surrender
of that city. He somewhat impaired his health as a result of his service.
When in the service, he won more than ordinary distinction as a war cor-
respondent, several newspapers having issued special editions on account of
his letters home. He is a member of the Society of the Army of Santiago de
Cuba. He was elected commander of Buckeye Camp, No. 51, United Spanish-
American War Veterans, Wooster, Ohio. He belongs to the Modern Wood-
men of America, Knights of Pythias, Brotherhood of American Yeomen and
the Improved Order of Red Men, all of Wooster.
September 28, 1898, Mr. Critchfield married Rose Brown, youngest
daughter of Allen Brown, of Saltcreek township, Wayne county, Ohio, and
they have three interesting children : Lyman Robert, born 1903 ; Henry Brown,
born 1905 ; and Dorothy Emily, born 1907. Mr. Critchfield is an exemplary
member of the First Methodist Episcopal church of Wooster, and resides at
No. 64 North Buckeye street, while his office is located on the public square.
Mr. Douglas, in his “Lawyers of Wayne County,*' published in the year
1900, says of him : “Although but a young man in years, and in his profes-
sion, he is foreshadowing qualities that insure a successful professional career.
He has the bearing of one who has worthy aspirations, and who will move
steadily, and, as experience comes, strongly, on along the lines he has marked.
His natural ability, aided by opportunity, reinforced by industry and study,
justify this expectation. He is unaffectedly kind, accommodating and genial,
and as a consequence his personal popularity is as extensive as his acquain-
tances. His frankness and courtesy to his colleagues of the bar cause all his
professional relations to be of a most pleasant character.” This prophecy has
been realized.
In 1908, after a spirited contest with able competitors, Mr. Critchfield
was nominated for prosecuting attorney of Wayne county, and was elected
to that office, running ahead of his ticket. He has a very remarkable faculty
for making friends and has more devoted personal friends than many of his
age in Wayne county. As prosecuting attorney he has distinguished himself
by his industry and ability in managing and increasing volume of public busi-
ness. Both in public and private practice, he has displayed superior qualities
that characterize the good lawyer. For close and discriminating analysis of
legal questions, he has but few superiors; for that labor necessary for the
preparation of evidence and the study of legal principles he is untiring, and
the result is, the usual result of success. He brings to bear in his legal prac-
tice an hereditary courage and perseverance. For many years he has answered
( 45 )
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the call for public addresses, literary and political, and has gained excellence
in public speaking and very often manifests a genius for admirable expression.
He is rapidly gaining a high standing at the bar, and as a citizen of Wayne
county, for his ability and accommodating spirit in his office and practice, and
but few enjoy as great popularity. In the study of political questions, but few
young men took such interest. Measures of administration, as well as con-
stitutional questions, were familiar topics with him in early life, and when
William Jennings Bryan arose as the great luminary of Democratic ideas,
he became attracted to him by a strong political affection. This interest in
politics had the preconception of patriotic emotion. One of his ancestors at
the age of eighteen enlisted under Washington. Of the same family, many
were in the war of 1812 and the Mexican war. Of both lines of his descent,
many served and some died in the Civil war, and when the United States
went to the rescue of the oppressed people of Cuba, he enlisted in the Cuban
war and served until the people were free. He is especially to be recognized
as a citizen of Wayne county. Jacob Shaffer, his great-grandfather, lived and
died in and near Doylestown, in Chippewa township, after holding many local
offices in its early organization. His grandfather, or Moses Shaffer, practised
medicine for fifty years in Wooster; in skill, moral courage and benevolence
one of the pre-eminent men of Wayne county. His grandmother, Margaret
McClure Shaffer, was of a numerous, influential, and intelligent family of
McClures, early settlers of the county. His three uncles, Hiram, James and
Horace Shaffer, were in the Civil war, and Hiram was a great physician. His
intense affection for his mother, Adelaide, a daughter of Dr. Moses Shaffer,
attaches itself to the soil upon which she was reared. Married into the Brown
and Musser families, in the southeast part of Wayne county, he is identified
with those honorable families. In the meshes of metaphysics, the foregoing
are involved in character, and the subject of this sketch rightfully is entitled to
the respect of the people, and it may be reasonably hoped that as the lapse of
time creates a demand for able and honest public men, there are lines of pre-
ferment for his increasing ability and usefulness.
SAMUEL M. TAGGART.
It is proper to judge of the success of a man’s life by the estimation m
which he is held by his fellow citizens. They see him at his work, in his
family circle, hear his views on public questions, observe the operations of
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his code of morals, witness how he conducts himself in all the relations of
society and civilization, and are therefore competent to judge of his merits
and his demerits. After a long course of years of such observation, it would
be out of the question for his neighbors not to know of his worth, for, as
has been said, “actions speak louder than words.” In this connection it is
not too much to say that the subject of this sketch passed a life of unusual
honor, that he was industrious and had the confidence of all who had the
pleasure of his acquaintance. He was born on a farm that is now a part of
Orrville, his natal day having been the 14th of July, 1828, and he died on
the 17th of August, 1907, in the eightieth year of his age. His paternal
grandfather, James Taggart, was a native of county Antrim, Ireland, and em-
igrated to America prior to the war of the Revolution. The subject’s father,
Samuel Taggart, was born December 17, 1790, and died April 24, 1853.
He came to Wayne county in April, 1815, and settled on a quarter section
of land near Orrville, where he reared his family of twelve children.
Samuel M. Taggart was reared under the parental roof and secured his
education in the primitive schools of that early day. He was early inured
to the labors of farming, which in those pioneer days meant the clearing of
the land and the cultivation of the same under conditions which would in the
present day be considered almost impossible. He continued to carry on farm-
ing operations until about twenty-five years ago, when, feeling the weight of
years and being in a financial condition which justified him in throwing off
the active duties of the farm, he retired to the beautiful town of Orrville,
where he had erected a comfortable home and there he resided until his
death. He was practical and methodical in his farming operations, giving
his personal attention to every detail of the work, and was considered a very
successful man.
Mr. Taggart married, on October 31, 1854, Sarah Jane Slusser, a
daughter of Jacob and Anna Maria (Ilgenfritz) Slusser, her birth having
occurred on March 15, 1835, at Wooster, Wayne county. She was reared in
York, Pennsylvania. Her parents were natives of Ohio, and her father was
a very successful tobacconist, coming to Wayne county in an early day. They
were the parents of seven children, of whom the only survivor, besides Mrs.
Taggart, is Mrs. Harrison Wertz, of Dalton, Ohio. Mrs. Taggart’s family
is of German origin, her great-grandfather having been a resident of Baden,
Germany, where a principal street was named in his honor. To Mr. and Mrs.
Taggart were born seven children, of whom brief mention is as follows:
(1) Laura Ellen, who was born November 25, 1855, died in infancy. (2)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Francis Darwin, born January 16, 1857, is a graduate of Wooster Univer-
sity and now resides at Denver, Colorado. (3) Major Elmore Finley, who
was born October 6, 1858, was educated at Wooster University and at the
West Point Military Academy, having graduated from the latter institution.
He was appointed to the academy by the late President McKinley, of whom
he was a special favorite. Major Taggart is now stationed at Fort Ontario,
New York. (4) One died in infancy unnamed. (5) Mrs. Alice Amelia
Kimberlin, who is a widow and now lives with her five children near Orr-
ville. (6) David S., born May 10, 1865, is now deceased. (7) Howard,
bom April 21, 1875, lives at Baltimore, Maryland.
At the outbreak of the Civil war, Mr. Taggart gave unmistakable evi-
dence of his patriotism by enlisting for military service, but because of ill
health he was discharged before being mustered into the service. He was a
faithful member and liberal supporter of the Presbyterian church, and Mrs.
Taggart has held membership in this body since her young girlhood. She
is deeply interested in the society and is generous in her support of its various
interests. Fraternally, Mr. Taggart was identified with the Knights of Hon-
or and the Royal Arcanum. A man of many splendid qualities of character,
he made friends of all who knew him and his death was deeply regretted
throughout the community. Mrs. Taggart now resides in the family home-
stead on South Main street, which was erected by her late husband on ground
that had formerly been a part of his farm. She is a woman of culture and
learning and takes an abiding interest in all moral and educational subjects,
being especially opposed to the liquor traffic. She is a delightful conversa-
tionalist and a Christian woman of high and noble ideals.
RAYMOND F. CHRISTY.
The life history of him whose name introduces this review was for
many years identified with the history of Wayne county, of which he was a
native son and honored citizen. His business career was begun in this county,
and throughout the years in which he was identified with her commercial inter-
ests he was closely allied with her growth and upbuilding. His life was one
of untiring activity and was crowned with a degree of success attained by
comparatively few. He was of the highest type of business man. and none
more than he deserves representation in a work of this nature. His business
career furnishes a splendid example of what may he accomplished through
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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determined purpose, laudable ambition and well-directed effort, for the posi-
tion that he attained in life was won entirely through his own efforts.
Raymond F. Christy was a native son of the old Buckeye state, having
been born in Canaan township. Wayne county, on the 20th of March, 1852,
and his death occurred on the 9th of April, 1909, in the fifty-eighth year of
his age. In his veins flowed Irish and Norwegian blood, his father, James
Christy, having been a native of the Emerald Isle, while his mother, whose
maiden name was Roxanna Severcool, was born in Norway. The subject
was reared under the parental roof and attended the common schools. This
education he supplemented by attendance at Smithville Academy and the old
Canaan Academy. He engaged in teaching school, which vocation he fol-
lowed about four years. At the age of twenty-two years, in 1874, he engaged
in the clothing business at Orrville, and in this enterprise he met with suc-
cess from the start, and for many years up to the time of his death he was
the leading clothier in that city. He also had stores at Wooster, Dovlestown
and Cleveland, his store on Euclid avenue, in the latter city, being one of the
fine stores of that city. He took a keen interest in his home town and erected
the Christy block, one of the best business blocks in the city. He was also
a valued member of the Board of Industry of Orrville, a very practical and
efficient organization of the business men for the purpose of aiding the com-
mercial and industrial development of the city. He also for seven years con-
ducted a very successful shoe business in connection with his clothing store
in Orrville. He sold the shoe business, however, in 1907, and in 1908 he
disposed of the clothing business. Mr. Christy, during his commercial life,
suffered a number of severe losses, through fire, robbery and other causes,
but in spite of these reverses, he forged ahead and acquired a comfortable
competency. Though highly regarded because of his business ability and suc-
cess, his high standing in the community was attained because of higher
qualities than mere commercial ability. He possessed those sterling quali-
ties of character which enabled him to exercise a sympathy and generosity
of spirit which endeared him to all who enjoyed his acquaintance. Broad-
minded and straightforward, he allowed nothing to swerve him from what
he considered the right and he occupied a high position in the hearts and
minds of those who knew him best. His death was considered a distinct loss
to the city in which so many of the best years of his life were spent.
Mr. Christy was thrice married, first to Anna Hoy, of Wooster town-
ship, of a well-known family in Wayne county. Her death occurred two
years after their marriage, and subsequently Mr. Christy married Elizabeth
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Gavner, who died five years later. On June 4, 1900, he .wedded Florence
May Geyer, the daughter of Samuel and Lydia* (Lehman) Geyer, of Woos-
ter, where she was born and reared. A sister is Mrs. William Caskey, of
Wooster, where other relatives also reside. Mrs. Christy was a successful
teacher for six years prior to her marriage. She is well educated, having
supplemented her public school education by attendance at Smithville Acad-
emy, Wadsworth Academy, Wooster University and Bixler’s Business Col-
lege at Wooster. She is a lady of rare culture and attainments and pos-
sesses a business ability above that of the average woman.
Mr. Christy was a valued member of the Presbyterian church, of which
he was an active and generous supporter. He readily gave his endorsement
and support to every movement having for its object the moral, educational
or material advancement of the community and because of his faultless honor,
fearless conduct and stainless integrity he commanded uniform regard and
the love and esteem of his friends.
MAX J. LEICKHEIM
History generally treats of those who have attained eminence in poli-
tics or statecraft, in military circles and to some extent in the field of letters
and art, but has little to do with that sturdy class of citizens upon whom the
real prosperity and progress of the nation depends. It is left to specific biog-
raphy to perpetuate the record of the law-abiding citizens who, in the midst
of the active affairs of the work-a-day world, stand forth in integrity of pur-
pose, loyalty to friends and native land, and in that enterprise and industry
which make for the well-being of their respective communities. To this class
belongs Mr. Leickheim, who is of stanch old German lineage and who is
one of the progressive and successful business men of Orrville, where he
has gained prosperity through his own well-directed effort, the while com-
manding the unequivocal esteem of the community.
Max J. Leickheim was born in Millersburg, Holmes county, Ohio, on the
2d of July, 1865, and is the son of John and Elizabeth (Swigert) Leickheim.
The father, who is now an honored and respected citizen of Orrville, was
born in Germany in 1827, and received a fair education in the schools of his
native land. In 1852 he came to the United States, landing at the port of
New Orleans, from wlr'ch place he traveled up the Mississippi river to Cin-
cinnati. He was a cooper by trade and during the next three years he fol-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
lowed the cooperage business at Cincinnati. At the end of this period he
removed to New Bedford, Tuscarawas county, Ohio, where he was engaged
in a like manner for six years, following which he spent seven years in busi-
ness at Millersburg, this state. In 1870 he came to Wayne county, locating
at Apple Creek, but three years later he came to Orrville, where he followed
the cooperage business until his retirement from active labor, about twenty-
five years ago. He married Elizabeth Swigert, who also was a native of
the Fatherland, where she was born in 1825. She was reared, educated and
married in her native land, and her death occurred at Orrville in 1890. To
John and Elizabeth Leickheim were born the following children: Mary was
the wife of John Althen, of Elgin, Illinois, where her death occurred in 1907;
the next four children in order of birth died in their infancy ; D. J., of Orr-
ville; Anna, of Orrville; Henry P., and the subject of this sketch.
Max Leickheim was eight years old 'when the family removed from Mil-
lersburg to Orrville, and in the schools of the latter place he secured his
education. After completing his education he was employed about a year in
the cooperage department of the Orrville Milling Company, where his father
was also employed. In 1881 Mr. Leickheim accepted a position as clerk in
the grocery store of Barrett & Leickheim, and has been connected with the
grocery business continually since, including one year spent as a clerk in a
grocery store at Larned, Kansas. He went west in 1887 and returned to
Orrville in 1889, resuming work in his brother's store. On March 20, 1901,
he and W. H. Krieter purchased the store of his brother, this business rela-
tionship continuing about a year, when John Groher purchased Mr. Krieter’s
interest. Two years later the subject bought out his partner and has since
continued the business alone. He has been governed by correct business
principles and has succeeded in building up a large and lucrative trade. He
makes a special effort at all times to please his customers and carries a large
and well-selected line of groceries and the side lines usually found with a stock
of groceries.
In July, 1891, Mr. Leickheim was united in marriage to Anna E. Krick,
daughter of Philip and Sophia (Whitmyre) Krick, the former of whom was
born in Germany and the latter in Fulton, Stark county, Ohio. Mrs. Leick-
heim was born and reared in Orrville and in the schools of that city she se-
cured a good education. To this union has been born one daughter, Helen
A., who is at home with her parents.
Religiously Mr. and Mrs. Leickheim are faithful members of Christ
Reformed church, to which they give an earnest and generous support. Da-
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WAYNE COUNTY. OHIO.
712
vid Swigert, father of Mrs. Leickheim, was a carriage builder and veterinary
surgeon to the King of Bavaria and lived in the palace of the king. His
wife was a woman of superior attainments, having received exceptional edu-
cational advantages in her native land. The subject of this sketch is a man
of many fine personal qualities of character and occupies a deservedly high
position in the community in which he lives.
HIRAM B. SWARTZ.
Wayne county. Ohio, has been especially honored in the character and
career of her public and professional men. In every township there are to be
found, rising above their fellows, individuals born to leadership, men who
dominate not alone by superior intelligence and natural endowment, but also
by force of character which minimizes discouragements and dares great
undertakings. Such men are by no means rare in this section of the great
Buckeye state, and it is always profitable to study their lives, weigh their mo-
tives and hold up their achievements as incentives to greater activity and higher
excellence on the part of others just entering upon their struggles with the
world. Such thoughts are prompted by a study of the life record of Hiram
B. Swartz, attorney at law and ex-probate judge, living at Wooster. He has
long been one of the prominent figures of Wayne county whose interests he
has ever had at heart and sought to promulgate. His career has been char-
acterized by untiring energy, uncompromising fidelity, and devotion to a “sim-
ple life/* He is quick of perception, forms his plans readily and executes
them with alacrity, at the same time winning and retaining the high esteem of
all with whom he comes into contact by the honorable course which he has
pursued.
Judge Hiram B. Swartz is a Wayne county product, having been born in
Milton township. May 27. 1846. the son of Samuel and Mary M. (Miller)
Swartz, natives of Pennsylvania and Ohio, respectively. A complete record
of the subject’s parents and immediate relatives will be found on another page
of this work under the caption. “The Swartz Family.’*
To Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Swartz twelve children were born, an equal
number of boys and girls, of whom Hiram B. was the fourth in order of birth.
He was reared on the home place and when he reached the proper age he began
work in the fields, alternating farming with schooling in the district schools.
His parents were sturdy pioneer stock, plain, honest and kindly disposed, and
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
713
the wholesome environment of their home is clearly reflected in the lives of
their children. When sixteen years of age he left the common school and,
being actuated by a laudable ambition to gain a higher education, he entered
the academy at Seville, Ohio, where he spent two school years. He was a
close student and made rapid progress. In the winter of 1864-5 he was the
teacher in the old home school, known as Oakgrove. and gave eminent satisfac-
tion. In December, 1865, he went to Granville. Ohio, entering upon the
preparatory course of Denison University, where he completed the freshman
year of the classical course. His health then requiring a change and rest, he
gave up study for a time, but in the fall of 1868 he entered the law department
of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, having decided to devote his
talents to the legal profession, and he there pursued his studies for one year,
when he determined to complete his original course in the classics, and in
January, 1869. entered the literary department of that University. By his
untiring zeal and close application, he successfully carried the work of both
departments within the period of four years, and so graduated from both in
1872, by special permission of the faculty, as such a thing as graduating from
two departments the same year was, up to that time, without a precedent in
that institution.
Thus well fortified for the duties of his profession, Mr. Swartz, in the
fall of 1872, began the practice of law at Newark, Ohio, in partnership with
his brother, John M., then also a beginner at the bar, but who afterwards was
elected prosecuting attorney of Licking county, and later, circuit judge of the
fifth judicial circuit. In the fall of 1875 he removed from Newark to Woos-
ter, opening his office with Hon. H. K. McBride, and subsequently with Hon.
T. Y. McCray.
Taking an active interest in politics, Mr. Swartz, in the spring of 1877,
was elected mayor of Wooster, and was re-elected in 1879, serving four years
with great popularity and acceptance. During this period he codified the
criminal ordinances of the city, from the original record, was successful in
establishing the fifth ward, so as to secure better school facilities in that part
of the city, secured the regulation of hacks for passengers at the depot and
began the work of cleaning up the public square, which had long been used as
a place for unhitching and feeding, thereby enhancing the beauty of the city.
During his first term the water works of the city were completed and the
systematic sewerage of the city was commenced. He also succeeded in break-
ing up the tramp nuisance by applying the “Ball and Chain’’ under the super-
vision of Marshal Dice, and established the city prison system on a better basis
than formerly, and successfully enforced the first saloon-closing ordinance.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
H is administration of the mayoralty was noted for its dignified trials of
misdemeanors, its efficient public service and high moral tone, and marks the
beginning of the public improvements for which the city is now distinguished.
When his last term as mayor closed in 1881, he resumed the exclusive
practice of law, which he followed very successfully until 1888, when he was
elected probate judge of Wayne county, and was re-elected in the fall of 1891,
serving two terms with the utmost satisfaction to all concerned and having
thoroughly exemplified the doctrine that “Public office is a public trust/' At
the close of his second term in this office he once more resumed the practice of
law and has continued with unabated success to the present time.
An interesting chapter in the life history of Judge Swartz is that bearing
on his domestic life, which dates from October 8, 1872, when he was united
in marriage with Martha J. Davies, of Granville, Ohio, in which community
her father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. D. A. Davies, were long influential and
highly respected citizens. Mrs. Swartz is a woman of pleasing personality,
wherein good housekeeping, culture and refinement are harmoniously blended.
She and her husband are the parents of five children, of whom four, two boys
and two girls, are living, all noted for their high attainments and integrity.
They are graduates of the various educational institutions of Wooster. The
oldest daughter, Mary D., taught several years in the Wooster high school.
She then took a graduate course at Granville, Ohio, and another at Mechanics'
Institute at Rochester, New York, in domestic science, and then spent three
years in teaching the same at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. She then took a
post-graduate course and graduated at Yale with the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in 1909, and is now in the faculty of Teachers College, Columbus
LTniversity, New York City, having charge of the department of nutrition.
Wayne graduated in the regular classical course of Wooster University, and
during the past nine years has been engaged as teacher of English and history
in the high schools of Coshocton and Chillicothe, Ohio, and later of Bridg-
port, Connecticut, where he now resides. Paul and Esther L. are also gradu-
ates of Wooster University. The former was distinguished for his rapid
advancement in the natural sciences, and the latter for her genius in mathe-
matics and her love of the modern languages. Paul, who was assistant at the
chemical laboratory for two years under Doctor Bennitt, took a post-graduate
course at Boston Technical Institute, from which he was taken into the active
service by the Boston city commission and spent two years in the construction
of the sub-ways of that city. He then had charge of the construction of an
electric line from Annapolis to Washington, and afterwards served as one of
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
715
the constructing engineers of the new tunnel under the Detroit river at De-
troit. From there he was called into the United States government service
as engineer of construction at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and is now assistant
engineer in the department of maintenance of way of the Missouri Pacific
railroad, with headquarters at St. Louis, Missouri. Esther has been a teacher
of mathematics and the modern languages at Plano, Illinois, and is now lo-
cated and engaged in that work in the high school at Wakefield, near Narra-
gansett Pier, Rhode Island. All these children, though still young, are occupy-
ing positions of responsibility, and are doing credit to their parental home and
training and to the beautiful city of Wooster, Ohio, and her educational and
religious institutions. Mrs. Swartz has also contributed much for the ad-
vancement of religious and missionary interests and towards uplifting the
general social tone of the city, being greatly interested in public improvements,
cleanliness and thrift, and a woman who numbers her friends only by the large
circle of her acquaintances.
Mr. Swartz is a man of intense energy and application. He goes into
court w ith his case completely in hand. The labor of preparation is not con-
sidered. Everything depends on wrork and study — the study of men, as well
as books. In counsel he is inquisitive, exacting and exhaustive, wanting to
know the truth and the facts. As an advocate he is earnest, honest, resolute
and persuasive, seldom drawing upon his powers of forensic flights when the
plain facts are of greater value in presenting his argument. He is a peace-
maker by instinct, and settles many controversies. He is industrious and un-
tiring in his profession, and it is a rare thing to find him when not busy and
in action. He is regarded by all classes as one of the county’s enterprising,
progressive, public-spirited citizens, quick to see, to seize, to act and aid in any
project that means prosperity and growth to Wooster, and cherishing a deep
interest in the work of the churches and Sunday schools and in educational
advancement. Pleasant and impressive in address, he is kind, generous, con-
genial and companionable. He is also the author of a valuable law’ book en-
titled “How to Settle an Estate in Ohio," published by Waring Company at
Xorwalk. Ohio, and has in preparation another work on “Magistrate’s Prac-
tice," and has invented and patented a number of useful articles, among the
most important of which is an Australian ballot voting machine, which prom-
ises to do away with election frauds and the long and wearisome counting of
ballots at elections. He has achieved an honorable record in his profession,
and, in fret, all other circles, and he is esteemed for the many qualities that
go to make up the inherent and finer qualities of a refined gentleman.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
THE SWARTZ FAMILY.
From the days of the wilderness and wild beast to the opulent present,
the name Swartz has been a familiar and highly esteemed one in Wayne
county and without exception they have played well their parts in the county's
affairs and have always stood in the front rank of her citizenship. One of
the worthiest of this name was Samuel Swartz, who was born in Union
county, Pennsylvania, June 3, 1816, and when three years of age his parents
brought him to Wayne county, Ohio, in 1819, his father, John Swartz, set-
tling in Canaan township, and his wife, nee Blocher, and their seven children
starting life in a log cabin in true pioneer fashion. In 1834, at the age of
eighteen years, Samuel Swartz first came to his homestead and hired out to
John Miller, who recently had bought the tract from the government. He
continued thus to work as a hired hand at clearing the then almost unbroken
wilderness in company with his brother John until 1839, when he was
married to Mary M. Miller, the daughter of his employer, then scarcely
sixteen years of age, who had lived upon that farm from the age of six
years, and whose happy companionship he there enjoyed for more than
fifty years. She was born in Jefferson county, Ohio, July 1, 1824. In 1830
she came with her parents, John and Mary (Welday) Miller, to find a new
home among the then dense forests and bushy swamps of Milton township,
and located upon a quarter section of land near the center of the township
upon the beautiful spot where she continued to reside for nearly sixty con-
secutive years. Here, in their small cabin home, surrounded by almost
impenetrable woods, her young life found happiness in the open clearings
and in the horseback riding and neighborhood gatherings, until, to this wil-
derness home, in 1834, came one, Samuel Swartz, whose youthful life, unit-
ing with her own, turned both into that new channel which widened as the
years gradually ripened them for the better land. He was then a clean,
stalwart woodsman, always strong and robust, a hard and indefatigable
.worker. After the death of John Miller in 1840 Mr. Swartz purchased the
farm and began the erection of new and larger buildings. Under the
ringing blows of his ax, which he could wield with marvelous skill, the dense
forest on his land was swept away and by the careful culture of later years
his farm became noted as one of the finest in the county. He was a model
farmer, taking the lead in husbandry of every kind. He was enterprising
and thrifty, and prosperity constantly waited upon him and crowned his
honest toil. His young wife shared with him in all his enterprises, often
assisting him in the fields and clearings when household cares permitted,
and was no less distinguished than he for her many virtues. Samuel Swartz
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was a man of strong will and determined convictions of right and duty
and while these traits sometimes produced some friction in his dealings
with others, his honesty and integrity no one could question. He was a
generous and helpful neighbor and true friend, and was remarkably free
from every vice and had but little charity for any form of it in others. Of
pure thought, he never uttered a profane word or indulged in slang or vul-
gar speech of any kind. He was plain in dress and living and strictly tem-
perate in all his habits; tobacco and strong drink of every kind he held in
special abhorrence, and forbade the use of them upon his premises. Under
the daily inspiration of such an example it is quite consistent that every
member of his large family grew to maturity free from every one of these
common vices. He was public spirited and was at different times elected
to offices of public trust, which he filled very creditably. By industry and
economy, at the age of forty years he was free from debt, and most of his
subsequent earnings he expended in the education and culture of his chil-
dren, to every one of whom he gave every opportunity in his power to ob-
tain a good education. He was greatly assisted in this through the care
and self-denial of his faithful wife, as her warm heart and active hands
were unceasingly engaged in making provision for their support and clothing,
at home and at school, and her gentle enthusiasm thus gave purpose and
direction to their young lives. Their family consisted of twelve children,
an equal number of boys and girls, of whom all the sons and four daughters
grew to maturity and are living at this writing. All of the sons and sev-
eral of the daughters obtained an academic education, and all of the former
pursued graduate courses in universities of their choice. John M., the
eldest son. graduated at Granville. Ohio, in 1869, and became a prominent
lawyer at Newark, Ohio, and was at one time prosecuting attorney of
Licking county, and afterward circuit judge in the fifth judicial district of
Ohio. Hiram B., whose sketch appears elsewhere in this work, graduated
from the literary and law departments of Michigan University in 1872 and
is now one of the leading members of the Wooster bar, having been mayor
of the city from 1877 to 1881 and later probate judge of Wayne county.
Franklin P. graduated from Denison University at Granville. Ohio, in 1876,
and from Rochester Theological Seminary in 1878, and for many vears
was pastor of the Baptist church at Loudonville, and later the First Baptist
church of Kings Mills. Ohio. Samuel E. graduated at Granville in 1879
and for many years was principal of the Newark schools, and is now pro-
fessor of chemistry and principal of the academy at Fairmount College.
Wichita, Kansas. Dr. Douglas A. was graduated from Adelbert College.
Cleveland, in 1884, and after a year or two of service as steward in the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Cleveland Asylum for the Insane, he began practicing medicine at Canton,
Ohio, and is now in successful practice at South Whitley, Indiana. Ulysses
G., the youngest son, graduated from Adelbert College in 1886 and is now
in active business in the oil industries at Whiting, Indiana. Of the daugh-
ters, Adeline married Henry G. Ziegler, now deceased; she is the mother of
a large family, one of her sons, Harley H., being for many years the pro-
prietor of the American House at Wooster, Ohio. Isabella married M. H.
Murdock, now deceased, late of Rittman, Ohio; she is now living at Barber-
ton, this state. Ellen S. married C. Blankenhorn, an educated and thrifty
farmer living near Creston, Ohio, in whose home “Grandma” Swartz re-
ceived the kindest of care during the last years of her life, after several
years spent in Wooster and elsewhere in the homes of her children. Sarah
is the wife of Rev. L. B. Harris, of Belton, Missouri. She completed her
education at Granville, Ohio.
Samuel Swartz lived to see all his children converted and members
of Baptist churches, and took great comfort in their progress. The mother
lived to see thirty-six grandchildren and thirty-nine great-grandchildren.
In politics Samuel Swartz was a life-long Democrat of the Jeffersonian
school and impressed his political faith upon every one of his children. He
had no taste for the follies of life, and having never sown any “wild oats,”
he had no bitter crop to reap, and thus handed down in the very lives of all
his children the happy fruits of a well-spent life. He was converted at an
early age and united with the Dunkard church, the cardinal doctrines of
which faith he ever stoutly defended. He differed from his brethren upon
some matters of dress and education and so drifted from them, but not from
the hope of the gospel, and as his children grew up and united with the
Baptist church, he with his good wife united with this denomination at
Sterling, Ohio, in 1870, and he was chosen deacon. It w as his custom to close
every day with family prayer, and he was a truly devout and consecrated
man. He was impatient that sin in any form should enter the household
of faith. He forgave and forgot all personal wrongs, and died at peace
with all the world, his serene and gentle spirit passing to its rest, after a
lingering illness of three years, which he bore with great patience and forti-
tude, on October 15, 1885, in his seventieth year.
Thus lived and died one of that noble band of pioneers whose strong
and brave hearts “made the wilderness to blossom as the rose.” All who
knew him remember him as one who loved integrity and hated iniquity; a
good-natured, cordial, honest man, whose worthy career should be emulated
by the youth who desire to leave behind them successful records and win
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the hearty approbation of all with whom they come into contact. His
faithful helpmeet survived him nearly a quarter of a century, answering
the summons that all that is mortal on earth must answer, February 5, 1909,
after a brief illness, at the advanced age of eighty-four years, seven months
and four days. She was ever a most devout and active Christian and the
memory of her long and beautiful life will rest like a loving benediction upon
all who came within the large circle of her personal influence, and her
good works will follow her, a precious heritage to her large family of one
hundred and eleven children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, includ-
ing their husbands and wives now living, and to the generations following.
DEWITT HOWARD McMILLEN. M. D.
Rising above the heads of the masses are many men of sterling worth
and value, Who by sheer perseverance and pluck have conquered fortune and
by their own unaided efforts have risen from the ranks of the commonplace
to positions of eminence in the professional world, and at the same time have
commanded the trust and respect of those with whom they have in any way
been thrown in contact. Among the earnest men whose depth of character
and strict adherence to principle excited the admiration of his contemporaries
Dr. D. H. McMillen was prominent. He was widely recognized as one of
the leading physicians of Wayne county and in his death the community
suffered a distinct loss.
DeWitt H. McMillen was born at East Greenville, Stark county, Ohio,
on October 12, 1848, and was the son of John and Rebecca (Nappenberger)
McMillen. Both h:s ancestral families were prominent and well known in
Stark county. The Doctor was reared under the paternal roof and secured
his elementary education in the common schools. He afterwards attended
the Smithville Academy and then, deciding to make the practice of medicine
his life work, he entered the office of his uncle. Dr. Alexander McMillen,
under whose direction he studied awhile. Subsequently he matriculated in
the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Cincinnati and after his gradua-
tion there he entered upon the active practice of his profession at West Leb-
anon with his uncle, Dr. Alexander McMillen. He remained in the practice
there a number of years, gaining a wide-spread reputation as an able and
successful physician, and in 1890 he removed to Orrville, with a view of se-
curing a broader field for his practice. Here he immediately took a fore-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
most place in his profession and for many years was considered the leading-
physician in this part of the county. He enjoyed a large and remunerative
practice and handled successfully many difficult and apparently hopeless cases
of disease. In private life he was a man whom to know was to admire.
Genial in disposition, courteous in manner and generous in his attitude to-
ward others, he won and retained a host of warm personal friends.
In his religious belief, Dr. McMillen was affiliated with the Orrville
Methodist Episcopal church, of which he was a stanch and liberal supporter,
being a member of the official board at the time of his death. His fraternal
relations were with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Knights
of Pythias, of both of which bodies he was an appreciative member. His
death occurred on the 15th of December, 1901, and at his funeral the remark-
ably large attendance was a notable tribute to the standing he occupied in
the community.
On January 1, 1876, Doctor McMillen was united in marriage to Alma
J. Braden, the daughter of John and Mary Braden, of Sugarcreek town-
ship, this county, where she was born and reared. This union was a most
happy and congenial one and was blessed in the birth of a son, Clyde Braden
McMillen, who is now married and residing in Chicago, Illinois.
JOHN McSWEENEY, JR.
For the high rank of her bench and bar Ohio has ever been distinguished,
and it is gratifying to note that in no section of the commonwealth has the
standard been lowered in any epoch of its history. To John McSweeney, Jr.,
one of the representative attorneys of the northern part of the state, we may
refer with propriety and satisfaction, for his record has been one of which
any community might well be proucl. He prepared himself most carefully
for the work of his exacting profession and has ever been ambitious and self-
reliant, gaining success and securing his technical training largely through his
own determination and well-directed efforts. He not only stands high in his
profession, but is a potent factor in state and national politics, his advice being
often relied upon in the selection of candidates and party policy, and he has
led such a career, one on which not the shadow or suspicion of evil rests,
that his counsel is often sought and heeded in important movements in the
county and state. By reason of numerous innate qualities, together with his
pleasing address, his honesty of purpose and loyalty to his native community.
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1 -*! . i : ’Ltd ’ . bench an 1 bar ( >1uo has e\ er been distinguished
an 1 u e'Xdiniun < n ae !hat in no section of the c< »mmomveabh 1ms 1 1
Mand-rd been k'wnni in am epoch ot its hMotv. T< > Join) MeS \ eenc\ . Jr.,
one < - f the represents t:\ e attonuw - of the northern part of the state, w e may
refer with propriety and satisfaction, for his record has been one of winch
any community might well he proud. lie prepared himself most careful'-,
for the work of his enacting* profe^iwi and has e\cr been ambitious and -»■ 1
reliant, gaining and -ecming his technical training largelv thnc'ig1* * -
own itetermh a1 ion and w ell-di tectr d efforts, lie not o.bv stands high m
pn n'ession hut is a potent (actor m state an<! national politics, his ad'iw- 1
often reds,1 urnm in the selection of candidates and parl\ policy. ;e R :
ltd mu a •• . : ecu < <ue on whuh (tot f lie -had' av or mu picio , o» e\ :f w
tl;at k i - • « ’.* -•! is otlen sought and Ceded in important timcueie ;
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oic isuig a< > 1 ■ - . !m lamimg of pm p- »-e and lo waits to iris natn e rrtFo
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Mr. McSweeney has reached a conspicuous elevation in his chosen field of
endeavor, and justly merits the high esteem in which he is held by all who
know him.
John McSweeney, Jr., was born in Wooster, Ohio, August 1, 1854, the
son of John and Kate (Rex) McSweeney, each representatives of fine old
pioneer families. The paternal grandparents of the subject of this sketch
were John and Jennie (O’Connel) McSweeney, who came from Cork, Ire-
land, in 1824, and settled at Blackrock, New York, later moved to Navarre,
Stark county, Ohio. They were the parents of seven children. The entire
family, with the exception of one child, died of cholera at Navarre, Stark
county, Ohio, in 1828, John, the youngest, being the sole survivor. He was
taken by Mrs. Grimes, attended school, and was sent to St. Xavier College at
Cincinnati. When about fifteen years of age he selected John Harris, of Can-
ton, Ohio, as his guardian, who removed him to the college at Hudson, Ohio.
John’s father left him about eighteen hundred dollars in money, with which
he was educated and became the great orator and lawyer. In 1849 John mar-
ried Kate Rex. The great-grandfather of the subject of this sketch, on the
mother’s side, was Jacob Rex, and his great-grandmother, whose maiden name
was Phillips, were born in England but with an admixture of German blood.
They came to America and settled at Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, the town
being named after the great-grandmother, Phillips. The maternal grandpar-
ents of John McSweeney, Jr., were Jacob and Cathrene (Witton) Rex, and
were born in Phillipsburg. Their children were George, Jacob, John and
Cathrene (or Kate), who married John McSweeney at Wooster, Ohio, George
and Kate living here at that time.
Six children were born to John and Kate (Rex) McSweeney, namely:
Two died in infancy, and Mary, aged nine years, died in Wooster; John, of
this review, and Kate and Jennie survive.
John McSweeney, Jr., while yet a boy decided to follow in the foot-
steps of his father in the legal profession, and he succeeded to his office, his
library and his practice, and he has been assiduous in his business, animated
by the spirit and lingering presence of a distinguished and able sire, a man
who needs no Tuscan urn to contain his ashes as a reminder of what pro-
found learning and forensic eloquence may achieve. He assiduously prose-
cuted his studies in the local common and high schools, graduating among
the first from the latter, and when twenty-one years of age, a time when most
young men are only getting well launched in their school work, he was grad-
uated from the University of Wooster, where he had made a brilliant record.
(46)
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He then began studying law very earnestly in his father s office and later
took a course in the Boston Law School, and he was admitted to the bar in
1879, and ever since that date his practice has been growing until he now has
a clientele second to none in Wayne county. He was soon singled out by
party leaders for public positions owing to his general popularity and recog-
nized ability, and from 1879 t0 I883, and immediately upon his admission to
the bar, he was city solicitor of Wooster, and from 1883 to 1889 he very cred-
itably filled the office of prosecuting attorney of Wayne county, both respon-
sible positions having illustrated the vigilance and prudence of a conscientious
public official.
The harmonious domestic life of Mr. McSweeney began in the spring of
1884, when he formed a matrimonial alliance with Ada Mullins, in education,
refinement and temperament and in Irish descent, like himself, and in this old
homestead of his parents, with their boys, this congenial association illustrates
the sanctity and perpetual serenity of a beautiful domestic life. This union
has resulted in the birth of the following children : Rex, James, John, and
Averil, the last named dying in 1894. The maternal grandparents of these
children were James and Hannah (White) Mullins, Mr. Mullins being a
native of Dublin, Ireland, who came to America in an early day and was suc-
cessful here in his life work.
Mr. and Mrs. McSweeney made an extensive tour of Europe in 1895,
viewing, at Dublin, the ancient seats of the Mullins and McSweeneys, where
Sween, the Norwegian king, guided his leaking hulk and tattered sails, in
the storms of the northern seas, to found a race of immortal genius; they
later visited England, then to Germany, France and other interesting places
on the continent.
John McSweeney, Jr., was born, educated and reared to manhood under
the most propitious environment, and his parentage was prophetic of the per-
sonal graces and mental versatility which characterizes his manhood. In his
father he enjoyed as brilliant an example as any Greek pupil ever found in his
great master, and he carried in his blood the eloquent suggestiveness, critical
wit, and conversational eloquence of the most perfect life of his time in these
respects. But a German realism and common conservativeness predominated
and moulded the Irish and elegant effusiveness of his father into the more
steady illumination and persistent rationality of the German mind. A strange
combination to produce an infrequent genuineness of characteristics of which
he is the residuary legatee. Inheriting this genius of one unsurpassed in the
accomplishments of eloquence, wit and logical endurance of mental power, as
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was his father, so may he rejoice in the sanctification of virtue, prudence and
good sense which marked the Rexes and which were possessed by his mother
and illustrated by his uncle, Hon. George Rex.
Mr. McSweeney is a scholarly man and has a fine library of choice and
standard literature, of which he is an appreciative student; however, his legal
work necessarily requires the major part of his attention, owing to its increas-
ing volume of recent years. As his industry and vigilance as city solicitor
and as public prosecutor elicited the hearty commendation of every one. so
the evolution of greater qualities obtained him the nomination for judge, and,
though a Democrat, the appointment by two Republican governors of trustee
of a state institution is a criterion of his high standing in public life; and be-
cause of his public spirit, his honesty in all his relations with his fellow men,
his generous and kindly nature, he has won and retained a host of warm per-
sonal friends throughout northern Ohio. ,
As members of the Episcopal church, John McSweeney and his wife,
also their children, early attracted by the literary beauty of the Book of
Common Prayer, and the elegant and ancient form of worship, are consistent
in the observance of the general principles of religious ethics. Without pro-
fanity, severity of piety or intrusive appearance of devotion, they are amiable
citizens. The criterion of loving our neighbors is finely illustrated in John
McSweeney. He has the dignity of a commoner. He is a kind, generous
laborer in the pursuits of men; possessed of a liberal ancestral estate, he is
loyal to it; he labors for a living, and in his office as at the bar his nervous
forces play in the dramatic anxieties of legal analytics and in the forensic
and flowery combinations of logic and art and rhetoric. He displays an intel-
lectual avidity among the occult themes of his profession. He contests his
own thoughts with the interrogation of an inquisition. He is an orator in
his high moments of rationalistic imagination and eloquent self-forgetfulness.
Born and cradled among the leaves of the classic and the philosophic, he
suckled the thoughts and the poesy and the spiritual enthusiasm of immortal
authors, and his memory is a sarcophagus of the living images, and musical
cadences, and fantasies, of every genius. Thus in the evolution the drama of
the books was to play among the hereditary fibers, and attune the strings,
with orphean melody. Presupposing that the inheritance of wealth is an
enervating element in the life of a genius, — a disease called aristocracy, — the
younger McSweeney is not more aristocratic than the elder who coined this
competency out of his genius, or than the mother Whose prudential ability
saved it. The honor of it all is in the benevolent proprieties, in its appropri-
ation to taste and learning and in many generous alleviations of necessity,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
one of the crowning virtues of the subject of this sketch. To him belongs a
democratic simplicity in hereditary purity, the tact of meeting mankind with
an open face, and a sparkling eye, and a shining cascade of glittering thoughts
— beatitudes of providence. Of hospitality, the monopoly is his; of invited
guests, and public men, the club-house is his home, and lunch and social chat
and entertainment wear away to the meridian of night. Perfectly temperate,
the life of intellectual anniversaries, the toastmaster at banquets, scattering
his classical quotations and allusions in the abandon of crowding imagery and
reckless phantasy, he stands immaculate as his own original. To the critic of
occasional dramaticism in his mental manifestation, it yet remains that John
McSweeney in general magnificence of mind, in demonstrative, conversa-
tional enthusiasm, in the light of his expression, in the spontaneity of his man-
ner and gesticulation, in the appositeness of his quotations, in the memory of
quaint oddities of literary life and illustrative biography, all accompanied with
good sense, philanthropy, and the power of analyzing occult distinctions, has
no counterpart in the writer’s knowledge of contemporaries.
ROBERT L. LUPOLD.
Back to stanch old German stock does Robert L. Lupoid trace his line-
age and that in his character abide those sterling qualities which have ever
marked the true type of the German nation, is manifest when we come to
consider the more salient points in his life history, \vhich has been marked by
consecutive industry and invincible spirit, eventuating in his securing a high
place in the confidence and respect of his fellowmen. The subject’s paternal
great-grandfather was a native of Germany, but emigrated to the United
States and settled in Pennsylvania, where Samuel Lupoid, the subject’s
grandfather, was born and reared. His son, Samuel, the subject’s father,
was born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, but when a mere boy came to
Ohio, settling in Holmes county. He learned the trade of a carpenter, at
which he became a proficient workman, and he built many of the best homes
and business houses in Holmes county. He lived in that county continuously
up to the time of his death, which occurred in 1901, at the age of sixty-five
years. He married Susan Wheaton, who was born in Millersburg. Holmes
county, Ohio, and her death occurred about thirty-five years ago, at the age
of forty- four years. To this worthy couple were born six children, namely:
Lenora, the wife of Joseph Mitten, of Millersburg, Ohio: Robert L. was
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725
the next in order of birth; Rebecca is the wife of Howard Mast, of Millers-
burg; Joseph is deceased; Samuel Henry, who has been in the regular army
for more than twenty years and is now stationed at Washington, D. C. ; Vic-
tor, who resides at Mishawaka, Indiana.
Robert L. Lupoid Was reared and educated in Holmes county, residing
there until about 1889, when he removed to Orrville. He was at that time a
farmer, which vocation he followed up to about 1904, when he came to Orr-
ville to live, since which time he has followed the contracting business. He
was a progressive, enterprising and successful farmer and the general condi-
tion of his property indicated him to be a man of good taste and sound judg-
ment. For thirteen years he was also engaged in the dairy business, in con-
nection with his agricultural work. He is equally successful in the contract-
ing business and has performed many contracts in and about Orrville, as
well as other parts of Wayne county. He is a careful and painstaking super-
visor of his Work and employs none but responsible workmen, so that his
name to a contract is a sufficient guarantee of its faithful performance.
In December, 1880, Mr. Lupoid married Mary Imhoof, a daughter of
John M. Imhoof, of Mount Eaton, where she was born and reared. To this
union four children have been born, namely: Howard Allen, of Orrville;
Ida May, who died in infancy; Harry G., of Orrville, Ohio; Jessie Bell, who
is bookkeeper in the office of the Orrville Courier.
In matters political Mr. Lupoid gives an earnest support to the Demo-
cratic party, and has served two years as assessor of Greene township. So-
cially he is a member of the Knights of Pythias and Knights of the Macca-
bees. In religion, Mr. and Mrs. Lupoid give their support to the Lutheran
church, of which they are both members and in the activities of which they
are both interested. As a public-spirited and progressive citizen he has ever
given his influence in the furtherance of good government, educational and
religious interests, and all that conserves the general welfare, while to him-
self is accorded the fullest measure of confidence and esteem. The family
occupy a position of prominence in the social life of the community and the
attractive home is a center of cordial hospitality.
JOSEPH WILLIAM HOOKE.
In one of the most exacting of all callings, the subject of this sketch
attained distinction, having been recognized for a number of years as one
of the most successful educators in the county of Wayne, and his success
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
in the business circles of the city since then has been no less gratifying. He
is a well-educated, symmetrically developed man, and his sterling qualities
of character, as well as his versatile ability, gained for him an enviable stand-
ing among those who know him.
Joseph W. Hooke is a native son of the old Buckeye state, having first
seen the light of day on a farm in Logan county, August 6, 1868. His par-
ents were Lewis J. and Lucy A. (Moomaw) Hooke, the former a native
of Rockingham county, Virginia, and the latter of Botetourt county, the
same state. Lewis J. Hooke was reared and educated in his native state,
and when old enough he learned the trade of miller, in which line he was
engaged at the outbreak of the Civil war. Though at that time a sympa-
thizer with the Union, and being also exempt from military service because
of his occupation as a miller, he enlisted in the Confederate army as a sub-
stitute for his employer, who was a married man. He served a short time
as a private, and at the age of twenty-one years he was captured by the Union
soldiers and soon afterwards was released on parole.
Joseph W. Hooke received his elementary education in the public
schools, supplementing this by three years’ attendance at Mount Morris Col-
lege, Illinois. He then engaged in teaching district schools until 1892, when
he went to Bucyrus, Ohio, where he had charge of the commercial branches,
and as supervisor of drawing and writing in the public schools, until 1894.
He then had seven years of business college work, in which he met with uni-
form success, and in 1902 he joined the faculty of the Wooster high school
as principal of the commercial department and supervisor of writing and
drawing, which departments he established. He demonstrated in no uncer-
tain manner his ability as an educator and his thorough familiarity with
the subjects under his charge, and he occupied a high position in the esteem
of faculty and pupils. After giving three years’ faithful service in this
capacity, he resigned his position in order to accept that of secretary of the
Peoples Savings and Loan Company, which position he still holds. In this
responsible position Mr. Hooke demonstrated the possession of business
abilities of a high order, and his relations with the public were always of
the most agreeable and pleasant nature.
Politically, Mr. Hooke is a stanch Democrat, but is in no sense an
aspirant for public office of any character. Religiously, he is a member
of the Church of Christ, in which he has taken a most active part, having
been honored with all the offices within the gift of the church. His support
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and influence are always given unreservedly to all movements for the ad-
vancement of the highest interests of the community, and he is numbered
among the city’s best citizens.
On the 20th of June, 1894, Mr. Hooke was united in marriage to Bertha
E. Morrison, the daughter of William F. and Elizabeth (Chambers) Mor-
rison, of Bucyrus, Ohio, and to them have been born two children, namely:
Delia E., born December 23, 1895, and Mildred A., bom June 30, 1905.
Mrs. Hooke is a lady of culture and refinement and their attractive home
is the center of a large social circle. Mr. Hooke is a man of strong social
instincts, and holds fraternal relations with the Knights of Pythias, exem-
plifying in his life the beneficent principles of this order.
MICAJAH MILO MORLAN.
There is little that interests one more than to observe how different men
begin and continue the duties of life. Some commence in hesitation and
seem to hesitate at every obstacle they encounter. Others begin boldly, but
after a time they show by some defect in execution that they have not prop-
erly mastered their tasks. Still others commence with steady grasp of the
situation, and show by their subsequent accomplishments that they have
compassed the problem of life : to the last class success always comes, and they
are the men to leave behind them good names and large properties honorably
won in life’s struggle. Their children are left to reap the harvests of good
actions. Among such talented and enterprising men is Micajah Milo Morlan,
who has for many years shown himself to be a master of at least two lines
of endeavor, winning much more than local reputation both as an artist and
an oculist, and at the same time establishing an enviable record as a high-
minded, whole-souled citizen whom to know is to admire and respect because
of his genuine worth, his integrity and his courteous demeanor. He is well
known to the people of Wooster, where he maintains his office and his resi-
dence.
Doctor Morlan was born in Salem, Ohio, July 29, 1833, the seventh
child of Mordica and Eliza Ann (Dean) Morlan, a fine old family of that
city, plain, honest, unassuming Quakers, the father a woolen goods manu-
facturer, who was fairly successful in that line and reared his family in com-
fort and respectability. He was summoned “to the immortal dead who live
again” in the year 1879. ar»d ,n the same year his faithful helpmeet, who had
long traversed “life’s royal path” with him, joined him in the silent land.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Doctor Morlan received his education in Greenville, Pennsylvania.
Having, early in youth, decided to become an oculist, he took a thorough
course leading thereto in the Indiana Ophthalmic College, in Indianapolis,
where he made an excellent record, and from which institution he was
graduated in 1890, thus being able in his mature manhood to gratify an am-
.bition of long standing. After he left school in Greenville he exercised his
rare natural talents in painting, and he soon attracted considerable atten-
tion in this line, and after taking up the work of oculist he has continued to
paint when he could find the time, thus being a very busy man, being re-
garded by all familiar with his work as easily one of the foremost artists of
Wayne and adjoining counties, showing a delicate touch and a rare skill,
even now at his advanced age, that would discount the work of most young
men. As an optician his unbroken success of twenty years has gained for
him a prestige second to none in this section of the state, eighteen years
of that time having been spent in the practice at Canton, and his office in
Wooster has been a busy place since it was opened.
Doctor Morlan married Anna Mary Watson, September 27, 1859, a
woman whose esthetic taste harmonized with that of the Doctor, and was
always of much assistance to him. She was the daughter of Theodore and
Rachael Watson, an influential family of Hartsville, Pennsylvania. This
union resulted in the birth of the following children : Caroline H., bom May
5, 1862; Watson D., born February 17, 1864; Elwood D., born August 14,
1867; Irene R., born February 8, 1874, and Ida E., bom November 23, 1875.
Doctor Morlan was reared a Quaker, and he still adheres to the sturdy
principles inculcated by that denomination. Personally he is a pleasant
man to know, an excellent and learned conversationalist, hospitable in his
home and a genteel gentleman in every respect.
JOHN W. CUTTER.
After a residence of many years in the same locality, his daily life char-
acterized by qualities of sterling integrity, indefatigable industry and sound
business judgment, John W. Cutter has risen to an enviable position among his
fellow men and is today numbered among the representative men of his com-
munity and is eminently worthy of representation in a work of this character.
John W. Cutter, of Franklin township. Wayne county, Ohio, is a son of
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JOT IX W. CUTTF.R.
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John Cutter, who was bom in the state of New Jersey. Subsequently, he lived
for a number of years in Pennsylvania, and then in 1818 came to Holmes
county, Ohio. In 1831 he moved to Wayne county, where he lived the remain-
ing years of his life, his death occurring about the year 1886. The first re-
corded member of the Cutter family to come to America was a widow of
Samuel Cutter, Elizabeth by name, who emigrated from England to the New
England states of America about 1640.
Among the descendants of this couple was Samuel, who at the age of
twelve years desired to enlist for service in behalf of the colonists during the
war of the Revolution, and was not permitted to do so because of his youth.
He was ardently patriotic in his attitude and during a long life he took a deep
interest in the trend of public events and he retained even in his old age a
remarkably retentive memory of the scenes and events of the early days. He
married a Miss Cole and they became the parents of several children, namely :
Mrs. Susan Robbins, Mrs. Lena McHenry, Ephraim, Sallie McHenry, Mrs.
Elizabeth Brown, Mrs. Agnes Cole, Mrs. Charity Schamp, Samuel, Richard,
Ezekiel, Mary, wife of Henry Munson, Mercy, the wife of Samuel Charlton.
The father of these children was a stanch Democrat in politics. He was a car-
penter by trade, which vocation he followed in Pennsylvania, but after remov-
ing to Ohio he lived a retired life.
Ephraim Cutter came to Ohio in 1814. and here followed his trade, that
of a shoemaker; subsequently he took up the occupation of farming, locating
at North Moorland a number of years and later for some time living north of
Wooster. Later he located in Huntington county, Indiana.
John Cutter followed farming all the days of his active life and on com-
ing to Ohio he entered a large tract of land, the patent for which bore the
signature of President Jackson. He proceeded to clear this land of the dense
timber which covered it and developed a fine farm, on which he lived until his
death, which occurred there in 1886. His wife had preceded him to the un-
seen land, dying in 1868. Their remains lie buried in the graveyard which
lies near the Methodist Episcopal church at Moorland. John Cutter was noted
because of his many acts of charity, his benevolence being much appreciated
during those early pioneer days. He was a stanch Democrat in his political
views, but never accepted public office of any nature. He and his wife were the
parents of children as follows: Elizabeth, unmarried; Ephrain, James,
Brown, Mrs. Peter Wicker, Mrs. William Scott.
The subject of this sketch, John W. Cutter, was born on January 19,
1843, and spent his early days with his parents. He secured a limited educa-
tion in the district schools, his vacation periods being devoted to work on the
farm. He has always followed agricultural pursuits and has been fairly sue*
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
cessfnl, being accounted one of the successful farmers of his section. His farm
is characterized by splendid buildings, well kept fences, modern machinery
and other accessories of an up-to-date farm. Mr. Cutter shows sound judg-
ment in his operations, keeping in touch with the most advanced methods relat-
ing to the service of agriculture and has consequently been enabled to realize
handsome returns for the labor he has bestowed.
On June 6, 1872, Mr. Cutter was married to Margaret A. Cellar, who
was born March 1, 1846, in Holmes county, this state, a daughter of Joseph
and Phoebe (Corn) Cellar. Her parents were natives of Pennsylvania, where
they were married, and they came to Holmes county in 1824, making their
home there during the remainder of their lives. Mrs. Cutter's paternal grand-
father, Ephraim Cellar, was a veteran of the war of 1812, after the conclusion
of which he went to Jefferson county, Ohio, and thence to Indiana, where he
died. Mrs. Cutter's maternal grandfather was William Corn, who was bom
near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but later came to Holmes county, Ohio,
where he spent his remaining years and died. To Mr. and Mrs. Cutter have
been born the following children: Morris E., who died young; Joseph C., of
Franklin township, married Della Scott, and they have seven children:
Blanche, Maud, Mildred, Norma, Susan, William and Mabel. William L., of
Lorain. Ohio, married Bertha Scott, and they have had five children : Marcella,
Helen, Ruth, Catherine and one that died in infancy unnamed. Ira C. is the
wife of John Wirt, of Franklin township, and they have one child, Kenneth ;
Mabel and Myrtle, twins. Myrtle married LeRoy Sparr, of Franklin town-
ship; two children, Francis and Robert. Martha V. is still under the parental
roof.
Mr. Cutter is a Democrat in politics and has ever taken an intelligent
interest in local public affairs, though he has been in no sense an office seeker.
His many splendid qualities of character have won for him the unbounded
confidence and regard of all with whom he has associated. He was elected
county commissioner in 1898. took the office in 1899 and held it until 1902.
He was also for thirty years a member of the school board, and served effi-
ciently as township trustee. Fraternally he is a member of the National Con-
gress and the Masons. The family all belong to the Methodist Episcopal
church.
BENJAMIN S. BEVINGTON.
A worthy descendant of prominent and influential pioneers is Benjamin
S. Bevington, a progressive man of affairs whose residence is at Orrville,
Wayne county, Ohio. His birth occurred in Richland township, Holmes
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731
county, this state, on August 26, 1841. His father, Benjamin Bevington,
was a native of Pennsylvania, but moved to Ohio when a boy, accompanying
his parents, who settled in Holmes county, where, amid primitive conditions,
they developed a farm and became one of the leading families of the com-
munity, where the name Bevington has ever since been well known. The
father of Benjamin S. was the youngest of a large family. He received a
meager education in the rude log school houses of those early times, and,
after having been taught farming by his father, quite naturally took up
that line of work for a livelihood. In 1855 moved to Mount Vernon,
Knox county, Ohio, but after securing a good foothold there he returned to
Holmes county in 1861, and in 1868 moved to Maysville, Wayne county,
Ohio, buying a farm near the edge of that town, which in time became very
valuable. Here he lived and prospered, and here his death occurred in 1882,
at the age of seventy-three years. He married Sarah Wolgamott, who was
born and reared in Salt Creek township, Holmes county. She survived her
husband one year, dying in 1883, at the age of sixty-eight years. They were
the parents of ten children, six boys and four girls. Those living are: Levi
J., a farmer in Knox county, this state; Jacob, a carpenter of Akron, this
state; Benjamin S., of this review, and Clara, wife of William Beeler, of
Orrville. The paternal grandparents of these children came from England
and settled in Pennsylvania in an early day.
Benjamin S. Bevington was reared on the home farm, where he re-
mained until he was twenty years of age, assisting with the work about the
place during the summer months and attending the district schools in the
winter time. When he reached the age just indicated he manifested his
patriotism by enlisting in the Sixteenth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry
early in the great war between the states, and he served one year with a
very creditable record, having fought at Chickasaw Bluffs, Arkansas Post;
Thompson’s Hill and Champion’s Hill, both in Mississippi ; Black River
Bridge, siege of Vicksburg and in the battles of Jackson, Mississippi. Dur-
ing his career in the army he was never off duty.
After returning home from the army Mr. Bevington managed a farm
for Henry Pomeream, of Salt Creek township. Holmes county, for a period
of six years, after which he rented the farm for four years. During these
ten years he prospered by reason of his close attention to farming, which he
understood thoroughly. Desiring to manage a place of his own, he pur-
chased eighty acres of Mr. Pomeream and lived on the same for four years,
greatly improving the place. He sold it and went to Fredericksburg, Wayne
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
county, and there engaged in the livery business for two years and was build-
ing up a good patronage when he was induced to enter the employ of Charles
and Edgar Snow & Company, of Boston, as a buyer of horses, at a salary.
This was in 1883, and he was in their employ ever since until recently, a period
of twenty-six years, during which time he purchased thousands of horses in
Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio, having become a well-known
figure to the horsemen of those states and being regarded as an excellent
judge of livestock of all classes and grades, an expert, in fact, in the matter
of purchasing horses. A criterion of his unexcelled judgment and excellent
business ability is found in the fact that the Snow Brothers, a large and im-
portant firm, retained him in their employ so long. His easy manner, con-
geniality and general pleasing demeanor were of great assistance, — in fact,
invaluable assets to him in this line of work. Having resigned this position,
he is now practically retired from active business.
Mr. Bevington was married on February 24, 1881, to Valeria Wehrly,
a native of Holmes county, Ohio, and the daughter of John and Eugenia
(Chatelain) Wehrly, a well-known and highly respected family of that
locality. To Mr. and Mrs. Bevington three children have been born, namely,
Bertha, who died at the age of seven months ; Stella and Zella are twins.
Mr. Bevington is the owner of a fine farm in Greene township, which is
highly improved and managed in such a manner as to yield rich results.
He moved to Orrville in 1896 and he has a beautiful home on North Main
street. Mrs. Bevington and her two daughters belong to the Presbyterian
church. This family is held in high esteem in the vicinity of Orrville or
wherever its members are known.
Mr. Bevington is a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, Post No.
296, of Orrville, Ohio.
ADAM FOGEL.
The little republic of Switzerland has sent a large number of her best
citizens to the Buckeye state, many of whom have located in Wayne county,
where they have become identified with the leading agricultural and business
interests. Of this class of highly honored citizens, Adam Fogel is a worthy
representative. He was born in Switzerland, October 18. 1844, the son of
George Fogel, also a native of Switzerland, who came to America in 1852,
locating at Massillon. Stark county, Ohio, where he worked at his trade of
wagonmaker and carriage builder until his death, in 1862. He married Susan
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733
Hanna, of Switzerland. She is also deceased. Five children were born to
them, namely: Frederick, who was in the Thirteenth Regiment Ohio Volun-
teer Infantry, and who is now at the Soldiers' Home at Sandusky ; Henry
lives at Mansfield. Ohio; Adam was the third in order of birth; Elizabeth
married Mr. Andregg, of Mansfield; Mary married Mr. Eshie and they
live at Mansfield.
Adam Fogel came to America with his parents in 1852. He received
a meager education in the public schools and at the tender age of eight years
began working on the home farm, and when ten years of age he went among
strangers, working for two seasons on a farm at Sonneberg, Sugar Creek
township, this county. During the years 1857 and 1858 he drove mules on
the old Ohio canal from Cleveland to Portsmouth, Ohio, being thus employed
at the time James A. Garfield was working in a like capacity. Mr. Fogel
worked two seasons for the meager wages of six dollars per month. He then
began work for Russell & Company, a large manufacturing firm of Massillon,
Ohio, first taking care of their horses, and later, at the age of seventeen,
he began learning the machinist's trade, serving an apprenticeship of three
years and seven years as a journeyman, ten years in all.
In 1863 Mr. Fogel, believing that it was his duty to prove his loyalty
to the flag of his adopted country, enlisted in the Union army, a member of
Company A, One Hundred and Sixty-second Regiment Ohio Volunteer In-
fantry, in which he Served very creditably until the close of the war. In
1868 he located in Orrville, since which time he has been one of the leading
citizens of this city. For a number of years he was engaged in the grocery
business, but, after building up an extensive patronage, he retired from
active business eleven years ago, since which time he has devoted his atten-
tion to looking after his extensive property interests. He has a fine farm
of one hundred and ten acres in Sugar Creek township, besides much valu-
able property in Orrville. Considering the fact that he started in life in
such on humble way and so many obstacles had to be overcome, he is deserv-
ing of praise for what he has accomplished and the manner in which he has
achieved success, for he has been honorable in all his business dealings with
his fellow men.
Mr. Fogel was married in 1865 to Elizabeth Bair, a native of Switzer-
land, who proved to be a very faithful helpmeet, her encouragement and
sound counsel often assisting Mr. Fogel in his business enterprises. This
union resulted in the birth of six children, namely : Mrs. Emma Baugh, of
Orrville; Ella, who keeps house for her father; Frank is deceased; Mrs.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Cora Huntsberger, of Chicago; Mrs. Ida Reamer, of Greensburg, Pennsyl-
vania; Howard is living in Orrville and is telegraph operator for the Penn-
sylvania railroad, also the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus railroad; he is an
accomplished musician.
The mother of these children passed to her rest in 1901.
Mr. Fogel very ably served for a period of ten years in the city council,
and in 1909 was again elected councilman. He was a member of the council
when the city hall was built. He was chief of the fire department for eight
years. He is a thirty-second-degree Mason, having been a Mason since 1875,
belonging to the commandery at Wooster; also the Lodge of Perfection at
Canton, and the Scottish rite at Cleveland; he has been a member of the
Knights of Pythias since 1874, and is also a member of the Uniform Rank.
He takes much interest in lodge work and is popular in the above-named
orders throughout northern Ohio. He is a member of the Reformed church
at Orrville. Although he is now a Democrat, he cast his first vote for Lin-
coln.
Mr. Fogel has the original land grant issued by President Andrew Jack-
son, September 15, 1835, and made to Joseph Arnold, from whom Mr. Fogel
bought his farm in Sugar Creek township.
Mr. Fogel is one of those self-made men who has won success by hard
work and persistent endeavor. When a small boy he sawed wood after
school for his neighbors in order to earn a little money. Always of frugal
and industrious habits, he has gained a substantial competency for his declin-
ing years some time ago. He has the highest respect of all who know him.
JOHN BECHTEL.
The Bechtel family is one of the old and well-known ones of Wayne
county, and is of German ancestry. Jacob Bechtel, grandfather of John of
this review, was a native of Pennsylvania, in which state the early members
of this family settled when they came to America. The father of John
Bechtel also bore the name of Jacob, and he was born in Somerset county,
Pennsylvania, in 1802. He came to Wayne county, Ohio, about 1829, set-
tling in Greene township. He was married in Pennsylvania to Sarah Rhoades,
a native of that state, bo rn in Somerset county; her death occurred in 1845,
when about forty-two years of age. She and her husband were the parents
of seven children, the register of whose births follows: Mary, born in Penn-
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735
sylvania in 1827; Elizabeth, born in that state in 1828; Harriett, born in Penn-
sylvania in 1830; Sarah, born in Wayne county, Ohio, in 1831 ; John, of this
review; Jacob, born in Wayne county in 1836 and died in 1898; Samuel,
born in 1837 and died in 1852.
In April, Jacob Bechtel, father of John of this review, suffered one of
the greatest misfortunes that ever befell a citizen of Wayne county, his home
having been burned and his four daughters perishing, Mr. Bechtel sustain-
ing serious injuries in trying to rescue his children, and he died from the
effects of the wounds he received the following December. John, of this
review, then four years of age, and his brother Jacob were sleeping with
their parents at the time of the fire.
John Bechtel was born October 12, 1833, on the home farm, where he
remained until he reached the age of eight years, when he began life for
himself, working out on a farm, doing such chores as he could at that tender
age. In 1855 he married Harriet Mowner, who was born in East Union
township, and they moved on the old farm, which he and his brother divided,
and for forty-three years Mr. Bechtel remained on the place where he was
born, carrying on general farming in a successful manner and becoming well
situated. In the spring of 1898 he removed to Orrville, where he has a fine
home, and he still looks after his farming interests, owning two good farms.
One of his farms is probably the oldest in Greene township, but the soil has
retained its original strength, owing to its skillful management. The first
cabin built in the township was erected on this farm. The place was entered
from the government by Michael Thomas, and Jacob Bechtel, father of the
subject, purchased it from him, John Bechtel being the third man to own
the place.
To Mr. and Mrs. John Bechtel five children have been born, named as
follows: Sarilla, wife of A. W. Brennerman, of Greene township; H. M., of
Orrville, where he is engaged in the hardware business; Elizabeth, wife of
S. P. Eshleman, of Orrville, also a hardware merchant; W. B., cashier of the
bank at Massillon; J. O. is engaged in the drug business in Orrville.
Mrs. Jacob Bechtel married a second time, her last husband being
Michael Hawk, of East Union township, and two children were born to this
union, Lavina, wife of William Chapin, and David Hawk, both of Orrville.
John Bechtel was a member of the school board in Greene township for
twelve or fifteen years, during which time he did much to promote the educa-
tional interests of the same. Both he and Mrs. Bechtel are members of
the English Lutheran church at Orrville. He is one of the highly respected
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
citizens of this community, having led a life against which nothing ill can
be said in any way. He is deserving of a great deal of credit for what he has
accomplished, owing to the fact that he had such hard struggles in his early
life, but men endowed with the grit which he has always do things, no matter
what their environment may be.
GEN. AQUILA WILEY.
The history of the loyal sons and representative citizens of Wayne county
would not be complete should the name that heads this review be omitted.
When the fierce fire of rebellion was raging throughout the Southland, he
responded with patriotic fervor to the call for volunteers and in some of the
bloodiest battles for which that great war was noted proved his loyalty to
the national government. On the long and tiresome marches in all kinds of
situations, exposed to summers withering heat and winter’s freezing cold, on
the lonely picket line a target for the missile of the unseen foe, on the tented
field and amid the flame and smoke of battle, where the rattle of the musketry,
mingled with the terrible concussion of the bursting shell and the deep diapason
of the cannon’s roar, made up the sublime but awful chorus of death, at the
head of his command, bearing aloft the standard of Old Glory — in all these
situations, the subject faithfully performed his full part until disabled by
wounds from further active service. During a useful li fe in the region where
he lives he has labored diligently to promote the interests of the people, being
devoted to the public welfare, and his record has been such as to win for him
the high regard of all who know him.
Aquila Wiley was born near Mechanicsburg, Cumberland county, Penn-
sylvania, on the 20th day of February, 1835, and is a son of William and
Susan (Spahr) Wiley, the former also a native of Cumberland county. The
subject's paternal grandfather, Robert Wiley, served in the Revolutionary war.
William Wiley, the great-great-grandfather, in 1770 was given a homestead
grant of two hundred acres of land in Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, the
deed to which was signed by William Penn, a grandson of the noted English
Quaker and founder of the state of Pennsylvania. The family name was
originally spelled “Wylie," as shown by the official records of Cumberland
county. William Wiley, father of the subject of this sketch, died when the
latter was but a bov. Aquila received such education as was afforded in the
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737
schools of his boyhood days and in an academy at Mechanicsburg, Pennsyl-
vania, and at the age of seventeen years he came to Wooster. Ohio, where he
made his* future home.
In April, 1861, on President Lincoln's first call for volunteers, Mr. Wiley
enlisted for the three-months service, joining Company C, Sixteenth Regiment
Ohio Volunteer Infantry. This command was at once sent to the front, but
took part in no engagements beyond a skirmish with the enemy at Philippi,
West Virginia. At the end of it§ period of enlistment the regiment returned
home and was mustered out. The Governor then issued orders for the re-
organization of the regiment and its re-enlistment for three years, nearly all
of the men re-enlisting. The rank and file of the regiment were much dis-
pleased with the appointments of field officers and Lieutenant Wiley recruited
a company with the distinct understanding that they were not to serve in the
Sixteenth Regiment. He then went to Cleveland and received from Col.
William Hazen a commission as captain, he and his company being at the
same time given transportation from Wooster to Cleveland. The officers of
the regiment appealed to the governor to have this company transferred from
the Forty-first back to the Sixteenth Regiment, and it was then that Captain
Wiley showed his courage by utterly refusing to go back, and in this stand
he was backed up by the entire company.
The service record of the Forty-first Ohio Regiment was a glorious and
honorable one, few regiments having a record of more active service or of
greater valor in the face of the enemy. They took part in a number of the
severest struggles of that great conflict and amid all these experiences Captain
Wiley was always found at the head of his men, cheering them by his words
and setting them an example for personal bravery. He participated in all the
battles in which the Forty-first took part and at the terrible engagement at
Pittsburg Landing, while carrying the regimental colors and leading the regi-
ment in a furious bayonet charge, he fell terribly injured. In this charge
General Wiley was conspicuous because of his bravery and the enthusiasm
with which he inspired his men on to the assault, during which five men were
killed with the colors. He recovered from this injury, but later at the battle
of Missionary Ridge his horse was shot from under him and his left knee
shattered by a shell, making amputation necessary. General Wiley returned
to bis home in January, 1864, and after he had regained his health practiced
law at Wooster, in which he met with fair success. He has alwavs com-
manded the absolute confidence of his fellow citizens and has been numbered
among the honored residents of the city of Wooster, where so many years of
his life hive been spent.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Politically, General Wiley is affiliated with the Democratic party and was
elected and served one term as probate judge of Wayne county. His adminis-
tration of the office was so eminently satisfactory that he was nominated for
a re-election. The same year, 1878, he received the Democratic nomination
for Congress, his opponent being the late William McKinley. The General
resides in a comfortable and attractive home at No. 195 North Market street,
Wooster, where the spirit of the old-time hospitality is ever in evidence. Re-
ligiously, his wife is a member of the Baptist church, to which the General
gives an earnest and liberal support. Fraternally, he holds membership in the
Ohio Commandery of the Loyal Legion, where he maintains pleasant associa-
tions with his old comrades-in-arms.
On May 19, 1870, General Wiley was united in marriage to Emma
Power, the daughter of Neal and Sarah (McMillen) Power, of Wooster,
and to them were born two children, Walter A., born in 1872, and Ada M.,
born in 1875. The former is now a first lieutenant in the United States reve-
nue cutter service, and the latter is the wife of Henry Greenwell.
Of marked social qualities, General Wiley is well liked by all who know
him. His sterling manhood, his absolute integrity of character, his honorable
war record, his public spirited attitude towards all movements for the public
good and his consistent private life have earned for him an enviable standing
in the community and he is justly numbered among its representative citizens.
SYLVANUS G. COOK.
A man who enjoys a wide acquaintance throughout Wayne county, espe-
cially East Union township, of which he is a native, and who has won a
reputation for judicious dealing in all things, who is now enjoying the peace-
ful retirement of his twilight of life, is Sylvanus G. Cook, whose birth oc-
curred April 22, 1842, and who has lived in this county all his life, making
his home on the old farm in East Union township until 1907, \vhen he moved
to Orrville. His father was Robert Cook, who was born in Butler county,
Pennsylvania, December 3, 1803, who came to Ohio in the pioneer days, locat-
ing in Sugar Creek township, Wavne county, in 1816, when that section was
still a comparative wilderness. He secured land and developed it, becoming
an extensive farmer. He married Jennie D. Cummings, of Crawford county,
Ohio, in 1831. She was born in Crawford county, Pennsylvania, and her
death occurred in February, 1899. To Robert Cook and wife seven children
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739
were bom, among whom the following are living: Rebecca McCullough, of
Orrville; Liza Jane Sharp, living near Apple Creek, East Union township;
Nancy Bonewitz, of Wooster; Samuel, of Shelby, Ohio, and Sylvanus G., of
this review. The Cook family is of good Irish stock. The maternal grand-
mother of Sylvanus G. was Mary (McWilliam) Cook, who came from county
Tyrone, Ireland, reaching America when nine years of age, and settled in
Butler county, Pennsylvania, with her sister. Grandfather Samuel Cook
was bom in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, January 4, 1781, and he
migrated to Wayne county, Ohio, in 1816; the following year he moved to a
farm in Sugar Creek township. In the summer of 1816 he taught the first
school ever taught in Sugar Creek township. Prior to his coming here he
was married to Elizabeth McWilliams, of Westmoreland county, Pennsyl-
vania, and they became the parents of the following children : Sylvanus,
bom February 28, 1802; Robert, father of the subject of this sketch, was
born December 3, 1803; Asa, born December 23, 1805; James, born March
9, 1808; Christena, born June 16, 1810; Mary, born October 26, 1812; Amiel,
born August 29, 1815; Jemima, born April 3, 1818; John, born April 30,
1820; Jesse, born May 26, 1822; Josiah, born July 20, 1824.
Samuel Cook was in many respects a remarkable man, one of marked
influence and usefulness. He was a member of the Presbyterian church of
Dalton, Sugar Creek township, and he was one of the earliest of the public
educators and religious workers in the county. He reared a large and intel-
ligent family, giving them all a good start in life and an education such as
he could in those early days, and his grandchildren, of whom there are many,
seem to be worthy of their pioneer ancestors, taking a delight in maintaining
the honorable name that the family has always borne.
Sylvanus G. Cook, as already intimated, has spent the major part of his
life engaged in agricultural pursuits, having learned the “ins and outs” of
husbandry in his youth during the summer months, and in the winter time he
attended the district schools, receiving a fairly good education. The old
home farm is located four miles south of Orrville in one of the most highly
favored sections of the Buckeye state. He has always been regarded as a
very progressive and skillful farmer, so managing his affairs as to gain the
greatest results, keeping the place in a high state of cultivation and efficiency,
having reaped bounteous harvests during a long stretch of years and laid
by a competency so that now in his old age he finds himself surrounded
by plenty and has a modern and comfortable home.
Mr. Cook was married in 1873 to Ixwis Tasker, who was born in Paint
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740
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
township, this county, the daughter of James and Rebecca (Bales) Tasker, a
well-known family of that locality. To Mr. and Mrs. Cook the following
children have been born: Jennie, wife of D. E. Eymon, of Orrville; Mary,
the wife of Fred Bower, who is living on Mr. Cook’s farm; Frank, who is
fifteen years of age, is living at home; two children are deceased, Jimmie
having died twenty-two years ago, and Glen, who died in infancy.
Mr. and Mrs. Cook belong to the Presbyterian church at Orrville, and
they take a delight in the work of the same. The former has served as school
director in East Union township. He is a Bryan Democrat, and personally
he is a man whom it is a delight to meet, being a good conversationalist, jolly,
good natured and a man of high principles.
JOSEPH WARREN HOSTETTER.
A man whose memory is revered by a wide circle of acquaintances and
friends, and who lived a life that was exemplary in every respect, which re-
sulted in good to himself and family and the community in general was Joseph
Warren Hostetter. He became a prosperous and representative citizen of
Orrville, Wayne county, having been a man of great force of character and
determination of purpose, and although he has been called from his earthly
labors, the good he did still lives. Mr. Hostetter was born near Minerva,
Stark county, Ohio, October 3, 1840, the son of Joseph and Elizabeth Hos-
tetter. They were the parents of thirteen children, of whom all but one,
Lydia, who died some thirty-seven years ago, grew to maturity, Joseph W.
having been the second one to pass away, his death occurring January 15,
1902, after an illness of two weeks, through which he bore his sufferings
patiently and heroically. Besides him were eight sisters and three brothers,
namely: Mrs. Adeline Minerva Frederick, deceased, late of Canton, Ohio;
Mrs. Eliza Ann Martin, also of Canton ; Mrs. Mary A. Sweringen, deceased,
late of Plattsmouth. Nebraska; Mrs. Kate Lake, of Blue Springs, Nebraska;
Mrs. Harriet Robinson, of Sharon, Pennsylvania; Mrs. Sadie Hutchinson, of
Seneca, Kansas; Mrs. Elizabeth Blanchard, of Canton. Ohio; Mrs. Verdie
Keeler, of Sabetha, Kansas; Frank Hostetter, living in Oklahoma; Lewis, of
Canton, Ohio, and Austen, deceased, late of Kansas.
The boyhood days of Joseph W. Hostetter were spent at the parental
home. He received a common school education, and began his business career
by clerking for Haynes & Foster, of Slireve. Early in life he turned his
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
741
attention to photography and opened a studio in Uhrichsville, but in i860 he
entered the employ of his brother-in-law, Impertus Martin, but his patriotism
being aroused when the rebellion threatened to disrupt the Union, he left
the position and enlisted in the army at Canton and went to the front early
in the struggle as a member of the noted Fourth Ohio Regiment. This was
in response to Lincoln’s first call for troops. The first colonel of this regi-
ment was the gallant Lorin Andrews, president of Kenyon College, who was
one of the first to give his life for his country. This regiment enlisted for
one-hundred-day service, but later re-enlisted for three years, and it was
engaged in many of the severest battles of the war, bringing glory to the
Federal troops repeatedly. It was engaged in the battles of the Shenandoah
Valley; it fought at the great battles of Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Chancel-
lorsville. Later the regiment was sent to New York to quell the riots, and
then returned to Alexandria, Virginia. Mr. Hostetter was an active partici-
pant in all the work of this regiment. Many years after the war he revisited
the fields of many of the famous battles in which he had bravely fought.
After the close of the war Mr. Hostetter returned to Canton and worked
for C. Aultman & Company, as machinist. Later he was employed in a dry
goods store at Wellsville. In 1867 he came to Orrville and entered the
employ of Bartholomew Brothers in the dry goods trade. I11 1868 he pur-
chased the grocery business of Amos Eshleman and continued it for two
years.
In 1869 Mr. Hostetter was united in marriage with Eunice Boydston, a
native of East Union township, this county, the daughter of Thomas and
Elizabeth Boydston, a highly respected family of that community. She
proved a most worthy helpmeet and is now deceased, having been injured
in a street car accident in Akron, from the effects of which she died on Sep-
tember 23, 1909, and was buried by the side of her husband at Orrville. Soon
after their marriage they moved to Kansas, but they returned to Orrville in
1874 and Mr. Hostetter embarked in the real estate business and continued
in that line until his death, with the exception of two years, during which
time he lived in Toledo, where he was connected with the Toledo Legal News.
During President Arthur's administration Mr. Hostetter was appointed
postmaster at Orrville to fill the unexpired term of Henry Schriber, who
died while in office. Mr. Hostetter served in this capacity for nine consecu-
tive years in a very able and satisfactory manner. In later years he was a
very active member of the school board and at the time of his death was its
president. The cause of education was greatly strengthened during his con-
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742
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
nection with the board. He was a conscientious Christian, having joined
the Methodist church in 1867 under Rev. George W. Ball’s pastorate. For
many years Mr. Hostetter assisted Impertus Martin in conducting campmeet-
ings at Orrville and other places in the state. He was an open exponent
of the temperance cause and had the courage of his convictions, and in many
instances he proved his loyalty to this cause by giving financial and other
aid. In all matters that in any way aimed to advance the interests of Orrville
and vicinity he was deeply concerned and always did what he could.
To Mr. and Mrs. Joseph W. Hostetter one child was born, who died in
infancy.
Mr. Hostetter was a member of the Royal Arcanum. He was also an
active member of the Odd Fellows and the Grand Army of the Republic.
His life was an active one, and he was always encouraging and helping some
one, for he believed in helping others, — in fact, few men have done as much
for the progress of this community, and his place will always be greatly missed
for he was as the just man spoken of in Holy Writ, “whose light shines more
and more unto the perfect day.”
ALEXANDER THOMPSON CAMPBELL.
This sterling representative of one of the pioneer families of Ohio is a
native son of Wayne county, where he was reared to maturity on a farm,
early beginning to assume the practical responsibilities of life and lending
his aid in connection with the reclamation and improvement of the home-
stead. That he has lived and labored to goodly end is clearly indicated in the
position which he holds in the confidence and regard of his fellow men and
in the success which has crowned his efforts as an agriculturist, which has
been his vocation throughout his business career. His fine farm is located in
Congress township, and no resident of the community commands a fuller
measure of respect and esteem. This epitome of his life history will be read
with interest by his many friends and will serve as a permanent memorial to
his sterling character and worthy life.
Alexander T. Campbell is, as his name indicates, of Scottish descent, his
paternal great-grandfather, John Campbell, having emigrated from Scotland
to the L^nited States in 1784, locating in Pennsylvania, where he spent the
remainder of his days. The subject’s grandparents, Isaac and Mary Camp-
bell, were lifelong residents of Pennsylvania, where they were worthy and
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
743
esteemed fanning folk. The subject's maternal grandparents, John and Mary
(McLevy) Crum, were also natives of Pennsylvania, where they spent their
entire lives. An ancestor on the maternal side was General McLevy, who
served with distinction in the war of the Revolution. The subject's parents
were James and Anna (Crum) Campbell, both of whom were born in Hunt-
ingdon county, Pennsylvania, where they were reared and married. In 1851
they came to Wayne county, Ohio, and settled in Chester township, where the
father successfully followed agricultural pursuits until his death, Which oc-
curred on July 29, 1875. His wife died September 18, 1898. They were the
parents of six children, four of whom are living. In politics James Campbell
was originally a Whig, but on the formation of the Republican party he
joined its ranks and thereafter gave it his support. He was a member of the
Presbyterian church during his later life and served as an elder. He was
a man of sterling qualities of character and enjoyed the unbounded confi-
dence and regard of all who knew him.
Alexander Thompson Campbell was born on the paternal homestead in
Chester township, Wayne county, on The 13th day of September, 1857. He
secured a good elementary education in the common schools of the township,
and later he attended Smithville Academy two years, taking mathematics,
English and kindred studies. On the completion of his education he took
up active farming operations on his father's farm, which he continued until
the death of his mother, in 1898. He now owns a farm in connection with
his sister, Anna C. Campbell, on which he now resides, and has since devoted
his entire time and attention to its management. The place comprises one
hundred and sixty-seven acres and is most eligibly and pleasantly located.
Mr. Campbell has made a number of valuable improvements, including the
erection of a new barn, the remodeling of the residence and other improve-
ments which brought the place up to the highest standard of excellence. The
land is fertile and highly productive and Mr. Campbell, being progressive and
enterprising in his methods, realizes handsome returns annually for the
labor bestowed. Besides the cultivation of the soil, he also gives consider-
able attention to the breeding and raising of livestock, giving special attention
to Delaine sheep, Durham and Jersey cattle and Morgan and Norman horses.
He has been careful and discriminating in the breeding of his stock and there
may at all times be found some magnificent specimens of these animals on
his farm.
In politics Mr. Campbell has assumed an independent attitude, being
bound by no party ties, but on the contrary taking the stand that the can-
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744
WAYNE COUNTY. OHIO.
didate's personal qualities and fitness for office is of the most importance,
especially in filling local offices. In religion, his belief is in harmony with
that of the Presbyterian church, to which he and his wife belong, and to
which they give an earnest and generous support. Every movement calculated
to benefit the community morally, educationally, religiously or materially
receives their unqualified endorsement and support.
On the 8th of March, 1894, Alexander T. Campbell was united in the
holy bonds of matrimony with Ella Reid, a native of Wayne county, Ohio,
and a daughter of William and Sarah Reid, the latter of whom is deceased.
These parents were both natives also of Wayne county, their respective an-
cestors having come here from the eastern states. To Mr. and Mrs. Camp-
bell have been born two children, Mary Lucile and Florence Jane. Through-
out his business career Mr. Campbell has been emphatically a man of enter-
prise, positive character, indomitable energy and liberal views, and is thor-
oughly identified in feeling with the growth and prosperity of the county
which has been his home.
J. H. SEIBERLING.
Among the citizens well known throughout Wayne county, whose lives
have been led along such worthy lines of endeavor that they have endeared
themselves to their neighbors and a large circle of acquaintances is J. H.
Seiberling, who was born in Summit county, Ohio, in 1835, the son of Nathan-
iel and Katherine (Peters) Seiberling, both natives of Lehigh county, Penn-
sylvania. They came to Summit county, this state, in 1831 and purchased
ninety-six acres of timber land, which was transformed into a good farm in
course of time, Nathaniel Seiberling also managing successfully a saw-mill in
the early days. He prospered and bought a number of tracts of land which he
cleared, owning at the time of his death about one thousand acres of land in
Summit county. He was a strong Whig and later became a Republican. He
always took an active part in the affairs of his party. He was for many years
justice of the peace and has held various other local offices. He and his wife
were the parents of a large family, four daughters and nine sons, one daughter
and six sons now living.
Charles Seiberling, brother of J. H., of this review, served very gallantly
as a soldier for three years in the Union army.
J. H. Seiberling was educated in the common schools of Summit county.
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WAYNE COUNTY. OHIO.
745
Ohio. He assisted his father in the milling and farming operations he car-
ried on until the former was twenty-five years of age. He then bought one
hundred acres of land in Summit county, this state, and farmed it for two
years. Then he began manufacturing farming implements at Doylestown
with his brother, J. F. Seiberling, who had established the business in i860, the
firm name being Cline, Seiberling & Hower. Later it became Seiberling &
Miller, the members of the firm being J. H. Seinerling and Samuel H. Miller,
mentioned on another page of this work. Since then the firm name has re-
mained the same.
In 1890 Mr. Seiberling went to Jonesboro, Indiana, and there established
the Indiana Rubber & Insulated Wire Company, becoming president of the
same, which office he still holds, and the large success of this enterprise as well
as that mentioned above is due in no small measure to the wise management
and judicious counsel of Mr. Seiberling. Until 1903 he spent about one-half
of his time in Jonesboro and the rest of the time in Doylestown. Since then
he has made Jonesboro his permanent abiding place, giving his entire attention
to the business which he established there and which has grown to gigantic
proportions, the products of which now invade a vast territory. However, he
still retains his interest in the Doylestown company. He seems to have a
wonderful executive ability and knows how to handle his employes so that
they will be of the greatest benefit to the business. He always handles a good
grade of material and is honest in his dealings with his fellow men.
Mr. Seiberling was married in i860 to Elizabeth Baughman, daughter of
David Baughman, a pioneer of Summit county. Ohio, who came from Lehigh
county, Pennsylvania, and became a well known and influential man in his
community.
To Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Seiberling three children have been born, namely :
Martha, who married William Richards; A. Frank, who married Angie Cline,
and they are the parents of two children, Paul and Catherine; Robert W.
married Genevieve Lynn and they are the parents of one child, Robert James.
The Seiberling home is a modern and attractive one, beautifully located and
is known as a place of hospitality for the many friends of the family.
While a resident of Doylestown, Mr. Seiberling was a member of the
village council and of the school board. He is still a member of the Lutheran
church at that place. Fraternally he belongs to the Independent Order of Odd
Fellows, and politically votes with the Republicans. His life has been led
along worthy lines and has resulted in good not only to himself and family but
also to the community at large, for he is always interested in the success of
others.
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746
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
JAMES B. GINDLESPERGER.
The unostentatious routine of private life, although of vast importance
to the welfare of the community, has not figured to any great extent in his-
tory. But the names of men who have distinguished themselves by the pos-
session of those qualities which mainly contribute to the success of private
life and to the public stability, and who have enjoyed the respect and confi-
dence of those around them, should not be permitted to perish. Their exam-
ples are most valuable and their lives well worthy of consideration. Such
are the thoughts that involuntarily come to mind when we take under review
the career of such an honored pioneer as the gentleman whose name initiates
this paragraph. He is a representative of one of the old families of Wayne
county, and his mind links the early formative period with that of latter-day
progress and magnificent achievement. Such are the men particularly worthy
of mention in a work of this nature.
James B. Gindlesperger was born on the 24th of January, 1856, on the
old family homestead in Congress township, Wayne county, Ohio, and is a
son of Daniel and Susan (Shidler) Gindlesperger, both of whom were na-
tives of Pennsylvania, the former bom in Somerset and the latter in the
county of Washington. These parents were reared in their native state and
came to Ohio some time prior to their marriage. He was a carpenter by
trade, but during his later years he gave his attention to farming, in which
he was fairly successful. They are both now deceased. They were the par-
ents of ten children, of whom six are now living. In politics Daniel Gindles-
perger was a pronounced Democrat and took an active part in local political
affairs. He stood high in the community and for twenty years he gave effi-
cient service to his community in the capacity of justice of the peace. The
subject’s paternal grandfather, Christian Gindlesperger, was reared, lived
and died in Pennsylvania, as did also his wife. The maternal grandparents.
Daniel and Katherine Shidler, were natives of Pennsylvania, but came to
Ohio, taking up a farm in Wayne county, where they spent their remaining
days. They were persons of genuine worth and enjoyed the unbounded
respect of all who knew them.
The subject of this sketch was reared on his father's farm and secured
his education in the public school at Lodi and the high school at Burbank.
He was a good student and has supplemented his school training by lifelong
habits of close observation of men and things, so that today he is considered
a well-informed man. On the completion of his education he returned to
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
747
active work on his father’s farm, which he continued faithfully until 1888,
in which year he purchased a farm of eighty-three acres in Congress town-
ship, lying about one mile south of the old homestead. To the cultivation of
this tract he has since devoted his unremitting attention and that he has suc-
ceeded is evidenced by the general air of prosperity which pervades the place.
A new residence was erected and in many other ways Mr. Gindlesperger made
decided improvements on the property,, so that today it is the equal of any
in the township. The buildings are first-class and up-to-date, the fences kept
in good condition, and all the farm machinery necessary for the proper con-
duct of a twentieth-century farm are to be found here. Besides the carrying
on of general agriculture, Mr. Gindlesperger devotes considerable attention to
the breeding and raising of livestock, in which line of effort he has been
equally successful. He is thorough and progressive in everything he does
and keeps closely in touch with the most advanced ideas in relation to the
science of agriculture.
On the 28th of December, 1888, Mr. Gindlesperger was married to Alice
Byers, a native of Wayne county and a daughter of David and Elizabeth
Byers, who were natives of Pennsylvania, but early settlers in this section of
Ohio. To the subject and his wife have been born two children, Harry and
Hazel, the latter being now a student in the Congress high school.
Politically, Mr. Gindlesperger is an uncompromising Democrat and has
given an earnest support to his party. He has taken an intelligent interest
in local public affairs and served efficiently as a member of the township
school board for eight years. His religious belief is that of the Presbyterian
church, to which he and his wife belong, giving to the same their loyal and
generous support. A man of generous impulses, genial disposition and good,
practical common sense, Mr. Gindlesperger has readily made friends and he
stands today as one of the popular and enterprising men of his township. He
withholds his support from no movement or enterprise that promises to be
for the common good and is himself a definite influence for good in the com-
munity.
CLAYTON GOOD.
There is now taken under review the career of one of the sterling citizens
of Wayne county, Ohio, where he has practically passed his entire life and
where he has ever commanded unequivocal confidence and esteem. The
name which he bears has been prominently identified with the annals of the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
county since the days when the work of reclaiming the sylvan wilds of this
section of the state was inaugurated, and here he is now known as one of
the large land-holders and successful farmers of the county. He has ren-
dered his community efficient service in an official capacity and is numbered
among the sturdy, upright and progressive citizens, thus it may be seen that
he is peculiarly worthy of representation in a work of this character, his
character and services in the county making him thus eligible.
Clayton Good was bom in Congress township, Wayne county. Ohio,
on the 23d of June, 1876, and is the son of Daniel B. and Margaret (Worst)
Good. The former was born in Pennsylvania on November 10, 1841, and the
latter is a native of Ashland county, Ohio, where she was born April 1, 1843.
The subject’s paternal grandparents, John and Eliza Good, were l>oth born
in Pennsylvania, in which state they were reared and married, and in 1849
they came to Ohio, locating in Congress township, Wayne county, where
Mr. Good became one of the pioneer merchants. Subsequently he turned his
attention to the pursuit of agriculture and was eminently successful, owning
at the time of his death four hundred and seventy-five acres of fine land, the
greater part of which was in Wayne county. The subject’s maternal grand-
parents were Samuel and Mary (Martin) Worst, who were natives of Ohio
and Pennsylvania respectively, the former having been born in Chester town-
ship, Wayne county, on land which the subject now owns, and which his
father had entered from the government. Daniel B. Good was a farmer by
vocation and stood high in the communty. A Republican in politics, he took
a great interest in local public affairs, and was a member of the school board
in an early day, subsequently serving for many years in the capacity of a no-
tary public. He was the father of two children the subject and a sister. The
father erected a splendid family residence at Pleasant Home, where he spent
his last days, his death occurring on December 8, 1901. His widow is still
living.
Clayton Good was reared under the paternal roof and secured his ele-
mentary education in the common schools, attending the Congress high school.
Subsequently he attended the Bixler Business College at Wooster and was
thus well equipped to take up the duties of life. After completing his educa-
tion. he took up active farming operations, in which he realized that there
was as good a chance for a young man of energy as any other profession, and
his judgment has been abundantly verified during the subsequent years, as
he has achieved a distinctive success in the line of agriculture. He is now
the owner of two hundred and sixty acres of splendid fanning land. His
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original possession was a part of the old homestead, but to this he has added
one hundred and seven acres, owning now one of the best farms in Congress
township. He here carries on general farming and stock raising, in both
lines of which he has been enabled to realize a handsome profit. He main-
tains the premises at a high standard of excellence, the general appearance of
the place indicating the owner to be a man of good taste and sound judgment.
On the 3d of June, 1901, Mr. Good married Ellen Heacock, a native
of Mahoning county, Ohio, and the daughter of Oliver and Mary Heacock.
To this union two children have been born, Dorothy and Katherine. In mat-
ters political the subject gives his allegiance to the Republican party and is
rendering efficient service as a member of the school board, having ever had
a deep interest in educational matters. Mr. and Mrs. Good are members of
the Methodist Episcopal church, of which they are regular attendants and to
which they give a generous support.
In every avenue of life's activities in which he has been engaged, Mr.
Good has exhibited the highest qualities of citizenship and he stands as one
of the leading men of Congress township.
DAVID G. BLACKWOOD.
In the respect that is accorded to men who have fought their own way
to success through unfavorable environment we find an unconscious recogni-
tion of the intrinsic worth of a character which not only can endure so rough
a test but gain new strength through the discipline. The gentleman to whom
the biographer now calls the reader’s attention was not favored by inherited
wealth or the assistance of influential friends, but in spite of this, by per-
severance, industry and a wise economy, he has attained a comfortable sta-
tion in life, established a good home and become a worthy citizen of Wayne
— one of the most progressive counties of the great Buckeye commonwealth.
David G. Blackwood was born in East Union township, this county,
October 30, 1850, the son of William Blackwood, Sr., an influential and
highly honored pioneer of that township, whither he came in the thirties,
making the somewhat hazardous and tedious overland trip from his ancestral
home in Pennsylvania. He began life in a modest way like other first settlers
and in time the dense wilderness gave way to his “sturdy stroke’' to well-
cultivated fields and his log cabin was replaced bv a substantial and com-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
fortable frame dwelling. He married Hannah Gardner and here they reared
their children in a wholesome atmosphere, leaving them the heritage of a
good name, then passed on to their rest in the silent land.
David G. Blackwood, being ambitious from his early boyhood to suc-
ceed in what the poets would call “the battle of life/’ studied, hard and re-
ceived a good education in the local schools of Orrville and the high school
of Smithville, Ohio. He first turned his attention to teaching, which he fol-
lowed very successfully for a period of four years in the district schools, and
although his services were eminently satisfactory to pupils and patrons alike,
he decided not to make teaching his life work and left the school room never
to return as an instructor. He has been employed by the Pennsylvania Rail-
road Company for the past twenty-seven years, being freight agent at Orr-
ville ten years, and in 1900 was transferred to Wooster for duty as chief clerk
in the freight office, which position he now holds. He is regarded by the
company as one of their most faithful and efficient employes and his long
period of service is indicative of his faithfulness and fidelity to duty. Mr.
Blackwood has never had time to mingle much in politics, but he very ably
served as clerk of the village of Orrville for a period of four years, and as a
member of the council four years.
Mr. Blackwood was married on September 7, 1876, to Emma Weirich,
who was born in Millersburg, Ohio, the daughter of K. Weirich and wife,
highly respected citizens of that village, who afterwards moved to Orrville,
this county. This union resulted in the birth of one child that died in infancy.
Mr. and Mrs. Blackwood have numerous friends throughout Wayne county,
especially at Orrville and vicinity, where they were long among its worthiest
citizens.
CHARLES FAHR.
That life is the most useful and desirable that results in the greatest good
to the greatest number and, though all do not reach the heights to which they
aspire, yet in some measure each can win success and make life a blessing to
his fellow men. It is not necessary for one to occupy eminent public posi-
tions to do so, for in the humbler walks of life there remains much good to
be accomplished and many opportunities for one to exercise his talents and
influence which in some way will touch the lives of those with whom he
comes in contact. Although in the list of Wayne county's successful citizens
who have won state or national reputations the name of Charles Fahr may
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
751
not be found, yet there is much in his career that is commendable, and his
success forcibly illustrates what a life of energy can accomplish when his
plans are wisely laid and his actions governed by right principles, noble aims
and high ideals.
Charles Fahr, well-known deputy auditor of Wayne county, Ohio, was
born at Red Haw, Ashland county, this state, January 28, 1868. While very
young he removed with his mother, his sole dependent, to Plain township,
near Reedsburg, where she was employed as a domestic. Poverty prevented
his receiving more than an ordinary education, — in fact, the mere rudiments
of learning, — for during his school days he was compelled to labor on the
farm, attending the district schools during the winter months, known as
Union Institute, District No. 2, Plain township, later known as Mt. Wis-
dom. But he was ambitious and studied hard, and here, during the latter
part of his school days, he assisted in teaching, procuring some small means
which he put to good use by attending the Ohio Normal University, at Ada,
Ohio, during 1890 and 1892. This again consumed all his finances and he
returned and taught his home school for nine terms, studying in the mean-
time, until he became quite well informed on general topics, the sciences and
the classics. His ability as an able, conscientious and painstaking educator
became known and his services were in great demand. He was at the head of
the Reedsburg schools for four years, and in 1900 he was chosen principal
of the New Pittsburg schools, which position he retained, giving his usual
eminent satisfaction, up to 1909. He is at home in the school room and en-
tertains as well as instructs his pupils, and his ability to organize and man-
age classes and all the details of school work made him popular with pupils,
teachers and patrons, so that the most satisfactory results were accomplished.
Mr. Fahr’s domestic life dates from August 1, 1894, when he married
Mary Ebert, a lady of culture and refinement, of Apple Creek, Ohio, and the
daughter of an excellent family.
Early in life, Mr. Fahr had imbibed a love for equality and political
principles and therefore affiliated himself with the Democratic party and his
first public work as an organizer was during the campaign of 1896, when he
labored in behalf of Bryan, and his township gave a majority of thirty for
Bryan when it was normally Republican by seventy majority. His politics
can never be doubted as he has always been found fighting for the cause of
Democracy, as can be attested by his efforts in Chester township in the last
national and state campaign. He was a resident of New Pittsburg in Chester
township from 1900 to September, 1909, \vhen he removed to Wooster, Ohio.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
His record as a public school teacher can be attested by the fact that for
thirty-eight terms of experience, these have all been in but three different
schools. He was an active and energetic member of the Lutheran church at
New Pittsburg, Ohio, and the Sunday school superintendent there for nearly
six years, which position he resigned upon his removal to Wooster. He trans-
ferred his membership and is now a member of the Evangelical Lutheran
church of Wooster.
Upon the election of James L. Zaring as county auditor in the fall of
1908, he was appointed by Mr. Zaring, in the spring of 1909, as deputy audi-
tor, and he assumed his present position on October 18, 1909. Personally he
is a pleasant man to meet, always courteous, considerate, genteel and kind, so
that he is generally popular throughout the county, with all classes, irrespec-
tive of party ties.
DAVID JAMES.
In the death of the subject of this sketch, which occurred on the 25th of
September, 1904, at his home in Franklin township, Wayne county suffered
a distinct loss, he having been for many years numbered among the strong
and virile characters. A man of forceful personality, sound judgment and
enterprising spirit, he had long occupied a high position among his fellow
agriculturists, and had achieved a large measure of success in his life work.
David James was born in England, October 7, 1826, and was a son of
George and Ann (Sealy) James, who migrated to America in 1832. They
located on a farm in Franklin township, Wayne county, where they bought one
hundred acres of land, for which they paid seven hundred dollars, this being
the farm on which the subject's widow now resides. The country was at that
time but sparsely settled, there being but one house between the James home
and Wooster. There the parents made their home during the remainder of
their lives, the father dying in 1859 and the mother in 1870. George James
was a stanch Whig in his political faith and was an active and influential man
in his home neighborhood. To him and his wife were born four children,
namely: William Albert, who died at the age of twenty-three years; John S..
whose death occurred April 25, 1896; Amelia, deceased; David, the subject of
this sketch.
David James was but six years old when the family emigrated to the
Lnited States and here he obtained a fair common school education. When
old enough he was apprenticed to learn the blacksmith's trade, but never fol-
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753
lowed it as a vocation, his entire life from that time on being spent on the home
farm. At his father’s death he took up the burden of its management and
eventually he acquired the ownership. He was a hard and discriminating
worker and succeeded in making this one of the best farms in Wayne county.
He erected several splendid buildings, bought improved and up-to-date ma-
chinery, and followed the best and most advanced methods in the cultivation of
the soil. He was prosperous and bought other land, so that at his death he
owned over two hundred and fifty acres of as good land as could be found in
the community.
In 1853. Mr- James married Ellen Gilmore, the daughter of Thomas and
Dorothy (Young) Gilmore, of Holmes county, this state. The union was a
most happy one and was blessed in the birth of the following children ; Thomas
A., of Franklin township, this county; Dorothy Ann, at home; William Alfred,
of Franklin township, who married Minnie Florence Morgan, and they have
two children, Hugh Carl and Mary Ellen ; Jesse Gilmore is the wife of Alverta
Watson, of Franklin township, and they are the parents of three children,
Harry, Nellie and Blanche Ellen; Mary Nellie became the wife of Frank E.
Langell, of Wayne township, and they have five children, Mark Bunyan,
James Maxwell, Floyd, Myrel David and Francis Henry; Martha Nettie is the
wife of Frank Shaw, of near Shreve, this county, and they have two children,
Ernest and Forest ; Wesley David, who lives in Iowa, married Emma Morgan,
and they have seven children, Glenn. Lucille. William McKinley, Althea, Ken-
neth, Harrold. Max: John Charles, of Franklin township, married Flora
Franks, to which union has been born one child, Clark; George Walter died at
the age of nineteen years; Lorenzo Ellsworth died at the age of sixteen years;
Frederick Herbert married Alca Weetman, and they have two children, Earl
and David; Francis Asbury, of Franklin township, married Nora Swinehart.
and they are the parents of four children : Lester. Virgil, Harold and Wayne ;
Amelia Ellen is the wife of Wilbur Snure, of Franklin township; Sealy, of
Wayne township, married Anna Bucher, and they have three children, Mabel.
Ellen and Chester Allen; Anna Hortense is the wife of Richard McCoy, to
whom she has borne one child, Ellen Marie.
Mrs. James’ parents, Thomas and Dorothy (Young) Gilmore, were na-
tives of England, the former having been born at Somersetshire, November
17, 1810, and the latter at Bristol March 31, 1810, and at the latter place their
marriage occurred. On May 1, 1831, five weeks after their marriage, thev
came to the United States, locating first at Fredericksburg. Wayne countv.
Ohio. Later they moved to Honeytown, Wayne county, this st^te, but two
(48)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
years afterwards they settled at Martins Creek, in Holmes county, where they
remained thirteen years. Mr. Gilmore first followed the occupation of a miller
and subsequently he purchased the Hockenberrv Mill, which he operated until
his wife’s death, when he bought the Cider mill in Franklin township. He
operated this mill twenty-eight years, when his second wife died, and he there-
after made his home with his daughter, Mrs. James, until his death, which oc-
curred at the age of ninety years, ten months and twelve days. He was a
member of the Methodist Episcopal church, of Which he was an earnest and
liberal supporter, and he stood high in the estimation of all who knew him.
Politically, David James was a Republican and took a deep interest and
an active part in local public affairs. He was an interested member of the
Methodist Episcopal church, at Moorland, and served as trustee and class
leader. He was indefatigable in his efforts to advance the religious interests
of the entire community, and assisted materially in the erection of the second
church in Wayne county. His death occurred on the 25th of September,
1904. and his remains were interred in the cemetery at Moorland. Since his
death Mrs. James has personally directed the operation of the farm and has
achieved eminent success in her efforts. She possesses business ability of a
high order and has given to her affairs a discriminating intelligence that has en-
abled her to realize a handsome income from her property. She is well liked
by all who know her and in her hospitable and attractive home she gives a cor-
dial greeting to her many friends.
JOSEPH SHERCK.
Another of the native sons of Wayne county who has here passed his
entire life and by his energy, integrity and progressive methods attained a
high degree of success, is Mr. Sherck, whose fine homestead farm lies in
section 5, Franklin township. He is a representative of one of the pioneer
families of the state, since his father located in Ohio nearly three-quarters
of a century ago (in 1837). and that he has attained his prosperity by worthy
means is evident from the unqualified esteem in which he is held in the com-
munity where his life has been passed.
Joseph Sherck was born on the farm on which he now lives, on the
1 6th of November, 1849, and is a son of John and Catherine (Morr) Sherck.
The subject’s paternal grandparents were Peter and Barbara (Pefley) Sherck,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
755
who were natives of Pennsylvania, At the age of seventy-two years he
came to Wayne county and settled on the Franklin township farm, which at
that time contained but little improvement. He was a strong and sturdy type
of the early pioneer and enjoyed the respect of all who knew him. He died
June 4, 1876, at the age of seventy-nine years, eight months and fifteen days,
and his wife died September 14, 1885, at the advanced age of eighty-five years
two months and four days. They were active members of the Evangelical
church, which in those days held services in the homes of the members of the
society. Peter and Barbara Sherck were the parents of the
following children : Catherine, who makes her home with the subject ; Mary,
now deceased, who was the wife of John Morr; and John, father of the
subject. John Sherck received but a limited school education, though in the
great school of experience he was an apt scholar and by dint of close observa-
tion and sound reasoning he became a well-informed man. He was brought
by his parents to Wayne county when eighteen years old, was reared to the
life of a farmer and remained a resident of Franklin township, Wayne county,
until 1867, when he and his wife moved to DeKalb county, Indiana, where
they spent the remainder of their lives, his death occurring in 1887, at the
age of sixty-five years. He was a well-known local preacher of the Evan-
gelical church, though he served without salary. In politics he assumed an
independent attitude, voting for the man whom he considered best qualified
for the office. John and Catherine Sherck were the parents of two children,
Abraham, who is a resident of Dekalb county, Indiana, and Joseph, the sub-
ject of this sketch.
Joseph Sherck is indebted to the common schools of Franklin township
for his mental training and, with the exception of four years prior to his mar-
riage, when he was employed in Wooster, his entire life has been spent on
this place. He here carries on general farming, raising all the crops common
to this latitude, and he keeps in close touch with the most advanced ideas
relating to the science of agriculture, so that he has long been numbered
among the representative farmers of the township.
The subject married Laura Ellen Lauck, who was born in Wooster
township, Wayne county, Ohio, January 9, 1851, the daughter of Joseph and
Harriett (Kramer) Lauck. Joseph Lauck was a native of the state of Penn-
sylvania, the son of David Lauck, and he came to Wayne county, Ohio, in
young manhood. He settled first in Wooster township, later at Madison-
burg, and followed the pursuit of agriculture all his active life. He is now
deceased, and his widow makes her home in Denver, Colorado. They were
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
consistent members of the United Brethren church, while in politics Mr.
Lauck was a Republican. Mrs. Sherck is their only child. To Mr. and
Mrs. Sherck have been bom six children, namely: Ora Alice, the wife of
Julius Gasche, of Holmes county, and the mother of one child, Charles; Julia
A., the wife of George Smith, of Franklin township, this county; Clara E.
is the wife of Lambert Gilson, of Holmes county, this state, and they have
three children, Virgil, John and Walter; Walter E. is at home; George M.
resides at Sullivan, Oh;o; Ida C. is at home with her parents.
Mr. Sherck is a Democrat in his political views and has been honored
by his fellow citizens, having twice been elected to the office of trustee of
Franklin township. He is public-spirited in his attitude towards all move-
ments having for their object the advancement of the best interests of the
community. Because of his fine personal qualities, he enjoys the unbounded
confidence and regard of all who know him, regardless of religious creed or
political belief.
JOHN JACOB LOWE.
One of the native sons of Wayne county who has here passed his entire
life figures as the subject of this sketch, and it is not irrelevant to state that
he is one of the most popular and highly esteemed citizens of Franklin town-
ship, where he is successfully engaged in farming, having a well-improved
and highly cultivated farm in section 8. As a member of one of our leading
pioneer families we here enter record of the more salient features in his
career.
John Jacob Lowe was bom April 13, 1859, m Saltcreek township, Wayne
county, Ohio, and is a son of Gilbert Lane and Catherine (Armstrong) Lowe,
the latter having been a daughter of John Armstrong, of Holmes county.
Gilbert Lane Lowe was born in New Jersey and at the age of thirteen years
came to Columbus, Ohio, with his parents, John and Rachael Lowe. A few
years later they settled in Holmes county, this state, where they remained
until Gilbert was married. After that event he came to Saltcreek township,
Wayne county, where he engaged in the carpenter trade and farming, dur-
ing his later years giving his attention exclusively to the latter vocation. He
remained in Saltcreek township until 1867, when he moved to East Union
township, where he resided until about two years prior to his death. He and
his wife were prominent and active members of the Methodist Episcopal
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church. In politics he had been at first an active Republican, but, in obedi-
ence to the dictates of his conscience, he subsequently allied himself with the
Prohibition party and was equally vigorous in its support. His death oc-
curred in 1907, at the age of eighty-three years, while his wife died in 1868,
their remains being interred in the cemetery at Fredericksburg. Mr. Lowe's
second wife, who bore the maiden name of Effie Swinehart, survives her hus-
band and resides at Moorland, this county. To the union of Gilbert and
Catherine Lowe were born the following children: Ora A. is the wife of
Silas Smith, of East Union township, this county; Alice is the wife of James
Snyder, of Franklin township; Luella is the wife of William Ober, of Akron,
Ohio; John Jacob, the subject of this sketch, is the next in the order of birth;
Walter is a resident of Stark county, Ohio.
John J. Lowe, when four years old, removed with his family to East
Union township where he “was reared at the parental homestead and received
his education in the schools of that locality. He was reared to the life of a
fanner and has followed this vocation practically all his life. He has been
at all times wide-awake and alert in his business affairs and has so conducted
his operations as to realize a comfortable annual income from the same. He
has made many permanent and substantial improvements on his property,
which he has at all times kept in the very best of condition, and because of
his enterprise and progressiveness he is numbered among the reliable and
representative farmers of the township.
Mr. Lowe has twice been married. His first wife bore the maiden name
of Cerena Beam and is now deceased. To this union were bom three children,
namely : Osa A. married Alta Byrns and lives in Holmes county ; Roy Clay-
ton, who lives in Holmes county, married Mabel Byrns, and they have one
child, Rosetta; the youngest of these children is Wealthy Fern, now the wife
of Roy Slater, of Wooster. For his second wife Mr. Lowe chose Sadie Tay-
lor, a daughter of Mark and Catherine (Kuhn) Taylor, and to them were
born six children, of whom five are living, and all at home, namely: Alta,
Elton, Glenn, Lillian and Leo, the two last named being twins. Mark Tay-
lor, who at the time of his death, December 4, 1905, was numbered among
the well-known and highly-esteemed citizens of Franklin township, was born
in Somersetshire, England, February 5, 1823. In 1842 he emigrated to
America with his parents, locating in Franklin township, Wayne county,
Ohio, where the remaining years of his life were spent. His parents were
James and Mary Taylor, who on their emigration to this county settled first
near Wooster, later locating in Franklin township. James Taylor was a
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
stonemason by trade and followed that vocation during most of his active
years. He and his wife were the parents of the following children: Josiah,
bom November 27, 1820, died in infancy; Mark, bom February 5, 1823;
Martha (Mrs. John Tuttle), bom May 6, 1825; Thomas, born February 15,
1828; Mary, born January 13, 1830. became the wife of Samuel Bodine; Jo-
siah (second of this name), born April 22, 1832; Sarah, born April 14, 1834,
became Mrs. William Guyor; Elizabeth, born March 23, 1836, became the
wife of Thomas Gilmore; Hester, born March 21, 1838, became the wife of
William L. Newstetter, of Wooster township, but is now deceased; Jane,
born November 22, 1839, became the wife of Adam Schaaf. James Taylor
died June 1, 1853, at the age of fifty-seven years and one month, and his
wife died April 9, 1856, at the age of sixty years, five months and five days,
their remains being interred in the cemetery at Moorland. They were a grand
old couple and enjoyed the love of all who knew them. Mark Taylor was
a stonemason by trade, and followed that vocation largely during his life.
He also worked some as a cooper, which trade he had learned in his early life.
He was also successful in high measure as a farmer and Was prospered finan-
cially in all his undertakings, so that at the time of his death he was one of
the large landholders of the township. He was twice married. His first wife
was Sarah Boyd, whose death occurred June 15, 1854, at the age of thirty-
one years, ten months and twelve days. To this union was born one child, a
daughter Mary, who became the wife of L. A. Hall, of Chicago, Illinois. On
the 22d of March, i860, Mr. Taylor married Mrs. Catherine Gabriel, the
widow of Jacob Gabriel, and they became the parents of two children, namely :
Sadie C, born September 28, 1861, and Josiah J., born in 1864, who makes
his home in Franklin township, this county. Mark Taylor died December 4,
1905, and his second wife on November 30, 1898, at the age of seventy-three
years, seven months and twelve days.
In politics John J. Lowe is an ardent Republican and maintains at all
times a deep interest in the local affairs, giving his unreserved support to ev-
ery measure calculated to benefit the community in any way. His religious
belief is that of the Methodist Episcopal church, and he is a member and trus-
tee of the church of that denomination at Moorland. His fraternal relations
are with the Brotherhood of American Yeomen, Wooster, to which Mrs.
Lowe also belongs. In all the qualities that go to make up a stalwart and well-
rounded manhood, standing “four square to every wind that blows,” Mr.
Lowe is conspicuous and during the years of his residence in this community
he has ever enjoyed the unbounded confidence and the highest regard of all
who know him.
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RICHARD HARRISON.
One of the best known and most progressive agriculturists of Frank-
lin township, Wayne county, Ohio, is Richard Harrison, a native of Frank-
lin township. He is the son of John and Hannah (Shreve) Harrison and
his birth occurred on August 7, 1870. John Harrison, now deceased, was
born on August 1, 1796, in Franklin county, Pennsylvania, about seven miles
southwest of Uniontown. He was the son of Peter Harrison, who was the
father of fifteen children, thirteen of whom grew to maturity, the oldest
and youngest dying in childhood. Peter Harrison was reared in Maryland,
from which state he emigrated to Fayette county, Pennsylvania, thence to
Cumberland county, Ohio, and later to Harrison county, this state. John
Harrison's death occurred on the old home farm in Franklin township,
October 19, 1889.
John Harrison, with his brother, Elisha, came to the state of Ohio in
May, 1816, and settled in Franklin township. Before he left his native state
he was married on April 30, 1816, to Margaret Dysert, a native of Virginia.
They made the trip overland on horseback, bringing with them one hundred
and fifty pounds of flour, it being seventy miles to their destination in Har-
rison county. They settled first in section 22, about a mile south of where
he purchased land later. In 1826 he bought a farm where his son, the
subject, now lives, and there he lived until his death. In 1836 he built a
substantial brick house, the brick having been burned on the farm near by
the spot where the house was erected. Mr. Harrison also burned lime here
in the early days, and many of the old homes of the county are plastered
with it. He was an honest, plain, hard working man whom everybody
respected. He was a Quaker in his religious belief. He reached the advanced
age of ninety-three years, having been regarded by all as a useful citizen
and a kind and generous neighbor. Eleven children were bom to John
Harrison and his first wife, namely: William, deceased: Stephen, deceased;
John lives at Millardsburg, Ohio; Hannah married Jacob Miller; Jane
married John Frees; Elizabeth married William Cristwell; Nancy married
Mr. Sterling; two children died when young. The other child was Richard.
John Harrison's second marriage was to Hannah Shreve, who was born in
Holmes county, Ohio, south of the town of Shreve, the daughter of Samuel
Shreve. One child was born to this union, Richard. John Harrison, who
died in 1889, and is buried in the East cemetery at Fredericksburg, as is also
his wife.
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Richard Harrison was born on August 7, 1870, and was reared and
educated in the community where he was born, remaining at home until his
father’s death. He married Ida Merryman, a native of Morrow county,
Ohio, the daughter of Thomas and Hannah (Ruby) Merryman; the former
died in Morrow county, Ohio, while the latter is still living in Mount Vernon,
this state. The following children have been born to Mr. and Mrs. Richard
Harrison: Lena, Ethel, Donald (deceased), Nettie Belle.
Politically, Mr. Harrison is a Republican and he belongs to the Disciple
church at Fredericksburg. He has an excellent farm of two hundred and
forty acres on which he carries on general farming and stock raising in a
manner that shows him to be abreast of the times in these lines, his farm
being one of the “show places” of this township. Mr. Harrison has a large
and comfortable home, beautifully located, and here the many friends of the
family often gather, for he is one of the best known and most highly
esteemed men of the township and his friends are limited only by the circle
of his acquaintance.
WILLIAM FRARY.
Rising above the heads of the masses are many men of sterling worth and
value, who by sheer perseverance and pluck have conquered fortune and by
their own unaided efforts have risen from the ranks of the commonplace to
positions of comparative eminence in the business world, and at the same time
have commanded the trust and respect of those with whom they have in any
way been thrown in contact. Among the earnest men whose depth of char-
acter and strict adherence to principle exite the admiration of his contem-
poraries Mr. Frary is prominent and he is now recognized as one of the lead-
ing merchants of his portion of Wayne county.
William Frary is a native of the county in which he lives, having been
born at Burbank. Canaan township (called Bridgeport then), on May 27, 1859.
His paternal ancestors as far back as can be traced were New England Yankees
and in that section of the country were born and reared his paternal grand-
parents, Orange and Jerusha Frary. They were married in their native state,
and in a very early day they emigrated to Ohio, which at that time was consid-
ered a frontier state. Locating in Wayne county, they created a comfortable
home and acquired a modest estate, where they spent their remaining years
and died. The subject's maternal grandfather, Cornelius Seeley, was a na-
tive of Ohio, his family having been among the first comers here. Mr. Frary's
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McBride, early settlers and prominent citizens of Ashland county. To Mr. and
Mrs. Frary the following, children have been born: Leslie, who married Mag-
gie Shriner: Eugene; Grace, a student in the Burbank high school; Wayne
and Leah.
Personally, Mr. Frary is a gentleman of quiet demeanor, unassuming in
his relations with his fellow men, but nevertheless popular with all classes
and most highly respected by those who know him best. He has read and
thought much, possesses a broad mind well stored with knowledge, and is a
man of broad views and wide culture. Well posted in the general and political
history of the country and keeping in touch with the times on current events,
he is a loyal citizen and a true type of intelligent and symmetrically devel-
oped manhood.
CHARLES MUNSON.
No citizen of Franklin township, Wayne county, Ohio, is more widely
known or highly esteemed than Charles Munson. Of a sterling pioneer
family, he and his ancestors have been prominent in the development,* organ-
ization and maintenance of this county, always being safely counted upon
to endorse and support to the extent of their ability every good work, move-
ment and enterprise. A successful farmer, public-spirited citizen and faithful
friend, Mr. Munson is eminently deserving of representation in a work
of this nature.
Charles Munson is descended from a long line of honorable ancestry.
The subject’s great-grandfather, Isaac Munson, Sr., was a native of Con-
necticut, who, some time after his marriage, emigrated with his family to
the state of New York, where his wife, Eleanor Andrews, died in August,
1815. Soon after her death he and his son Henry came to Ohio. They
passed the winter of 1815 in Holmes county and in the spring of 1816 they
located in Franklin township, Wayne county, where they made their future
home and where the father died on July 10, 1830. He was a man of many
and varied experiences, not the least of which was his service in the Conti-
nental army during the war of the Revolution, he having entered the
service at the age of fifteen years. The subject’s grandfather, Henry Mun-
son. soon after coming to Wayne county recognized the value of the lime-
stone deposits in this locality and he at once opened up the stone and built
the first kiln in the county. His preliminary test of the stone was made
by burning some of it in a big log heap. It proved to be of splendid quality
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and for many years he was successfully engaged in its manufacture. He
sold it at fifty cents a barrel and people from a radius of fifty miles came
to him for their lime. He shipped enormous quantities to Mansfield, Ohio,
by ox teams, it having been used in the construction of the old Wiler House
in that city. Mr. Munson took a leading part in local public affairs and
served as trustee of the township in 1839, 1840, 1841 and 1848. Henry
Munson was married November 15, 1821, to Mary Cutter, a native of
Holmes county. He then removed to Shreve, but five years later he returned
to the old homestead, where his death occurred on December 1, 1867. His
wife died May 4, 1872. They were the parents of seven children, namely:
Ezra, who married Ann Eliza Wycoff ; Isaac, father of the subject of this
sketch; Samuel C., who married Jane Hughes, the daughter of John Hughes;
Eleanor, who died September 9, 1856, was the wife of Jared Barker, of Sum-
mit county, this state; Mary, who died in 1862, was the wife of Isaiah Jones,
of Holmes county; Elizabeth, who remained single, died on October 12,
1856; Henry, born February 12, 1837, married Rebecca Jones, a daughter
of John Jones and granddaughter of Isaiah Jones, who died February 15,
1861. They had five children, John Henry, E. N., James K., William B.
and one that died in infancy. Rebecca Munson died November 30, 1876,
and subsequently Mr. Munson married Martha McCartney.
Isaac Munson, the subject’s father, was born on the 19th of September,
1823, and was reared to the life of a farmer. He received his education in
the common schools of the neighborhood and during his mature years sup-
plemented this education by much reading and habits of close observation.
He was the possessor of a large fund of sound common sense and was
practical in all his affairs. He long occupied a leading position in the com-
munity and at the time of his death, which occurred on February 13, 1898,
he was considered one of the representative citizens of the township. He was
twice married, first to Eliza A. Lowe, w ho bore him three children, namely :
Mary, who is the wrife of Samuel Geisinger, of Shreve, this county; Phoebe,
now deceased, was the wife of William Musser; Jacob is deceased. After
the death of his first wife, Mr. Munson, in 1856, married Susan Thomas,
who is now living at the advanced age of eighty-seven years. To this
union was born one child, Charles, the subject of this review. His birth
took place in the place where he now lives. May 10, i860, and he has always
made his home in this township. He w^as early initiated into the mysteries
of successful agriculture and has followed that vocation continuously since
taking up life’s work. He is the owner of a fine farm of three hundred
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acres, which is finely improved in every respect and is generally considered
one of the best farms in Wayne county. Good buildings, well-kept fences
and highly cultivated fields characterize the place, the general appearance of
which indicates the owner to be a man of sound ideas and practical methods.
Mr. Munson is progressive and energetic and is not slow to adopt new ways
of doing things when their feasibility has been demonstrated by experiment
and experience. In addition to the raising of a general line of crops, he is
also to a considerable extent engaged in the breeding and raising of livestock,
in which he has achieved a distinctive success.
Mr. Munson was united in marriage to Rebecca J. Yen Ordel, a native
of Holmes county, Ohio, and they have become the parents of two children,
Harry and Hazel. Harry was married on January 6, 1910, to Edna S.
•Crile, of Franklin township. Personally Mr. Munson is a man of splendid
qualities and has so ordered his life as to win and retain the unbounded
confidence and respect of those who come in contact with him. He is popu-
lar in the circles in which he moves and has ever been found on the right
side of every movement having for its object the advancement of the best
interests of the community.
OLIVER D. BRUCE.
Oliver D. Bruce, who is numbered among the leading and successful
business men of Shreve, Wayne county, Ohio, is an Ohioan by birth and
may justly bear the title of “self-made man,” having worked his way unaided
from the humble ranks of toil through the vicissitudes and adversities of life
to an enviable position in his community. The success attained in his busi-
ness enterprises has been greatly owing to his steady persistence, stern integ-
rity and excellent judgment, qualities which cause him to take rank with the
leading men of his community, besides winning for him the confidence and
esteem of the public to a marked degree.
Oliver D. Bruce was born in Holmes county, Ohio, on June 13. i860,
and is a son of Alexander and Elizabeth Bruce, both of whom are dead.
The subject attended the common schools of his home neighborhood, sup-
plementing this by brief attendance in the normal school at Millersburg.
He was reared to the life of a farmer and after leaving school he followed
that vocation, also engaging in teaching several terms of school, in which
he was highly successful. In 1890 he came to Shreve and engaged in the
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livery business under the name of Coffman & Bruce. The style of the firm
changed a number of times, but eventually Mr. Bruce became the sole owner
and ran the business alone until 1907, when he disposed of the business and
engaged in the real estate and insurance business. He is a man of pronounced
business ability and has met with very satisfactory success in his latest
enterprise. He has handled a number of important real estate deals in this
locality and is numbered among the solid and substantial business men of
the town. In the insurance field he stands well, carrying none but the best
companies and exercising a commendable conservatism in his placing of
risks. While a resident of Holmes county he stood well in the community
and served as clerk of his township. Since becoming a resident of Shreve
he h^s been several times honored by election to responsible offices, having
been elected mayor of Shreve in 1898, and serving in the position four years.
He was again elected to this position in 1907 for a two-years term. He
has given his community valuable and appreciated service as justice of the
peace, to which office he was first appointed and afterwards elected three
consecutive terms.
Politically, Mr. Bruce is a stanch Democrat and has been active in
advancing the interests of his party, having served a number of times as a
delegate to the county and state conventions of his party. Fraternally, he
is a member of Challenge Lodge, Knights of Pythias, at Shreve, and has
several times passed the chairs in this body. He is a man of acknowledged
ability and personal worth and by a life of unimpeachable integrity and
right living he has gained for himself the unbounded confidence and regard
of all who know him.
URIAS F. WELLS.
Few men of Wayne county are as widely and favorably known as Urias
F. Wells, whose attractive home is located in Clinton township. He is one
of the strong and influential citizens whose lives have become an essential
part of the history of this county and for years his name has been synony-
mous for all that constitutes honorable and upright manhood. Tireless en-
ergy, keen perception and honesty of purpose, combined with every-day com-
mon sense, are among his chief characteristics and while advancing individual
success he has also largely promoted the moral and material welfare of the
community.
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Urias F. Wells is a native son of the Buckeye state, having been born
in Ripley township, Holmes county, on the 28th of July, 1843. He is a son
of Aaron and Mary (Shreve) Wells. The subject's paternal grandparents
were Moses and Happy (Gorsuch) Wells, and the paternal great-grandfather
was David Wells. The latter was a native of Wales, from whose rock-ribbed
hills he came to the United States in 1816, locating first in Maryland and
later in Ripley township, Holmes county, Ohio. Moses Wells, who also was
born in Wales, came to this country at the time of the emigration of his
father, and settled in Maryland, near Annapolis. He married Happy Gor-
such after arriving in his new home. Subsequently he located in Holmes
county, where he remained until 1850, when he moved to Fulton county,
Ohio, where he spent the remaining years of his life. He was the father
of twelve children, of whom Aaron was the third in the order of birth. His
birth occurred in Holmes county, where he was reared to the life of a farmer
and where during his youth he secured his education in the neighboring schools.
He followed farming during all the days of his life and was a prominent and
influential man in the community. He was proprietor of the leading hotel
in that section where they had general muster. He married Mary Shreve
and they became the parents of the following children : Martin, Thomas,
Martha Jane, Ellen, all of whom are deceased; Urias F., the immediate sub-
ject of this sketch; Aaron, who lives in Clinton township, Wayne county.
Aaron Wells died when the subject of this sketch was about four and a
half years old and his widow subsequently married Isaac N. Fouch, to which
union were born the following children: Caleb S., who resides in Shreve;
Mary E., now deceased, who was the wife of William Easterday; Ira, de-
ceased. The subject's mother died in 1881 and her remains were interred
in the cemetery in Ripley township.
The subject of this sketch was reared under the parental roof and se-
cured his education in the district school. He made splendid progress in his
studies and at the age of eighteen years he engaged in teaching school, fol-
lowing this vocation during a period of ten years, during which time he ac-
tually taught seven hundred and twenty-five days and one hour. He then
relinquished the pedagogical chair for the plowshare and applied himself
closely during the following years to agricultural pursuits. He was a prac-
tical man in his operations and, besides the tilling of the soil, he also devoted
much attention to the breeding and raising of livestock, in which also he
was successful. In 1881 Mr. Wells became a resident of Wayne county,
where he has since remained. He is the owner of a fine farm in Clinton
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township and is numbered among the enterprising and successful men of the
county. He keeps in close touch with the most advanced ideas relating to the
science of agriculture and gives his personal attention to every phase of the
work, in consequence of which he has been enabled to realize a handsome
income from his investment. His property is well improved and is main-
tained at all times in the best of condition, the general appearance of the
place indicating the owner to be a man of excellent taste and good judgment.
Religiously, Mr. and Mrs. Wells are members of the Christian church,
with which Mr. Wells united on October 19, 1862. In October, 1881, he
became a member of the church at Shreve, and has been prominent and active
in advancing the best interests of the society. He has long been active in
Sabbath school work and served for the long period of forty years as super-
intendent of the school, his service covering two thousand and eighty consec-
utive Sabbaths. In politics Mr. Wells has been affiliated with the Democratic
party and has been actively interested in local public affairs. He has been
frequently elected by his fellowr citizens to offices of responsibility, in all of
which he has acquitted himself to the entire satisfaction of his fellow citi-
zens. He served three terms as assessor and twelve years as a member of
the school board in Ripley township, Holmes county, and since coming to
Clinton township, Wayne county, he has served as a member of the school
board many years, during nine of which he was president of the same. He
has also served as a water works trustee and clerk of the board. In these
positions he has given to the public interests the same careful attention and
applied the same business methods that he employs in his own private affairs.
His ability as a Sunday school worker has been recognized in his election to
the presidency of the Township Sunday School Association, which office he
held for five years. He is now president of the Wayne County Farmers’ In-
stitute, having held this office during eleven of the sixteen years during which
this organization has been in existence. In every avenue of life's activities
in which he has engaged, Mr. Wells has performed his full part to the best
of his ability, and this fact has been generally recognized by those in touch
with him and his work. Industry, integrity and progressiveness have been
the keynotes to his character and are the elements which have contributed to
his success.
Urias F. Wells married Louisa M. Mathewson, a native of Ripley town-
ship, Holmes county, Ohio, and a daughter of Robert and Rebecca (Ruble)
Mathewson, and their union has been blessed in the birth of the following
children: Robert D., who lives in Clinton township, married Maude Thomas;
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
to them have been born the following children : Ruth L., Thomas F. and Mil-
dred I.
Mary Shreve Wells, mother of the subject of this sketch, was a daugh-
ter of Thomas and Mary (Wagel) Shreve. Thomas Shreve. who was a son
of Richard Shreve and one of twelve children, came to Ohio in 1816, locat-
ing at Shreve. There he built one of the first mills in the county, in
connection with which he also operated a sawmill. He was an enterprising
and progressive man and did much for the upbuilding of the community. He
was the first postmaster and in other ways was a leading man among his
fellows, having served for many years as a justice of the peace. In connec-
tion with his milling business, he also successfully operated a farm. The
Shreve family is of Holland origin, the first of the name to come to America
being Israel Shreve, who married Maude, the daughter of a rich nobleman.
They came to the new world at a date prior to the war of the Revolution
and in this conflict the family took an active part on the side of the colonists,
Israel Shreve having been a member of General Washington's staff and pass-
ing through the terrible experiences at Valley Forge. The present members
of this family possess the original family coat of arms. Thomas and Mary
(Wagel) Shreve were the parents of the following children: Rosanna, who
is now dead, became the wife of Eson Hughes and the mother of twelve chil-
dren; Richard is the father of ten children; Margaret, the wife of John
Graven, became the mother of seventeen children ; Caleb, deceased, was the
father of six children: Charlotte became the wife of Peter Shreve, who was
no relation; Henry; Mary, mother of the subject; William; Eliza Jane, who
became the wife of Nicholas Crum and the mother of twelve children; Sarah
Jane married Thomas Morgan and became the mother of ten children. Mr.
Wells is a member of the Knights of Honor, of which there were one hun-
dred and fifty members at one time, but he is now the only one left. Mr.
Wells was elected in 18(79 and served three terms as a member of the Legis-
lature from Wayne county, and it is worthy of note that his paternal grand-
father served in that body in 1838-40. He has also been the leading stock
buyer and shipper in the county for fifty years.
MATHEW GAUT.
The biographical history of Wayne county would be incomplete were
there failure to make specific mention of Mr. Gant, who has passed his en-
tire life on the farm which is now his home. In his youth he was familiar
with the scenes and incidents of pioneer life, his father having been one of
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the early settlers in the county, coming here at a time when the section was
practically an unbroken forest, when Indians and wild animals were still plen-
tiful and when the homes of the settlers were log cabins of the most primitive
type. Reared thus on the frontier, as it was then called, the subject has
borne his part in the work of development, as did his honored father, both
having been factors in bringing about the transformation which has made this
one of the leading counties in the state, with its highly cultivated farms, thriv-
ing towns and villages, its school houses, churches and all other evidences that
show the mark of progress and culture.
Mathew Gaut was born on his present homestead in the township of
Canaan, Wayne county, Ohio, on the 3d of July, 1833, and is a son of Sam-
uel and Rebecca (Montgomery) Gaut, both of whom were natives of Penn-
sylvania, the former born in 1799. The subject’s paternal grandfather, Mat-
thew Gaut, Sr., was born in Pennsylvania, in which state he lived and died,
being a farmer by vocation. His son Samuel emigrated from the Keystone
state to Canaan township, Wayne county, Ohio, in 1821, and bought one hun-
dred and twenty acres of wild land. This he cleared and developed into a fine
and productive farm, on which he lived during the remaining years of his life,
his death occurring in 1879. He was of that sturdy pioneer stock which was
instrumental in paving the way for the present wonderful civilization and his
sterling qualities of character commended him to the confidence and regard of
all who knew him. In politics he was a stanch and radical Democrat and took
a prominent and influential part in public affairs during his active years. To
him and his wife were born the following children: Oliver, Mary, Mathew,
Harriet, John, Margaret and Vetencia, all of whom have passed over the
silent river excepting the third named, the subject of this review.
Mathewr Gaut was reared under the parental roof and secured his early
education in the district school at Gulden Corners. After the conclusion of his
school days he continued to assist his father in the work of the farm until he
had attained his legal majority, when he went to Iowa and was there employed
a few years. At the outbreak of the Civil war Mr. Gaut gave unmistakable
evidence of his patriotism by enlisting on June 13, 1861, in Company G, First
Regiment Iowa Volunteer Cavalry, w ith which command he served three years
and three months, being mustered out on the 9th of September, 1864. During
most of the period of his enlistment he was engaged in bushwhacking and in
fighting Quantrell’s gang of guerrillas. His command was a part of the annv
wrest of the Mississippi and also took part in several severe engagements, in-
cluding that at Prairie Grove and the capture of Little Rock, besides many
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minor battles and skirmishes. At the close of his military service Mr. Gaut
returned to Canaan township and resumed work on the home farm, continuing
to assist his father until the latter’s death in 1879, when the farm became his.
He has continued his residence here ever since and gave to its operation his
personal attention and undivided efforts until his retirement from active labor
a few years ago, since which time his son John has looked after the manage-
ment of the place for his father.
Mr. Gaut has been twice married, first to Julie Young, who was a native
of Chester township, Wayne county, Ohio, and a daughter of Isaac and La-
vina (McVicker) Young. Mr. Gaut’s second union was with Elizabeth Fran-
cis, a daughter of William Francis, of Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania.
Mr. Gaut has become the father of two children, John, born May 18, 1876, and
Ira, who is deceased. John was married on June 2, 1902, to Anna Rumbaugh,
of Congress township, this county, the daughter of William and Catherine
(McVicker) Rumbaugh, who were early settlers in this county. To Mr. and
Mrs. Gaut have been born two children, Edna and Wayne.
In matters political Mathew Gaut formerly gave a stanch and loyal sup-
port to the Democratic party, but in recent years he has stood independent
of party lines and votes for the men he considers best fitted for the offices
He has ever taken a deep interest in the advancement of the community in
which he lives and has always lent his support to all movements for the ad-
vancement of the best interests of the entire community. He stands as one
of the strong and sturdy pioneers of the county and enjoys the respect of all.
His memory forms a connecting link between the primitive past and the pro-
gressive present and few men now living in Wayne county are better informed
concerning its history when Ohio was a frontier state than is Mathew Gaut,
whose reminiscences of the early days are most interesting.
PETER HOUSEL.
Peter Housel was born in Hunterdon county, New Jersey, on the 14th
day of May, 1845, and was reared to the life of a farmer. In 1867 he came
to Wayne county, Ohio, and here he engaged in the carpenter and contracting
business, in which he was successful. He erected the Shreve high school
building and many of the largest and best residences in this part of the county
and was considered one of the leading men of his profession in this com-
munity.
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Mr. Housel was united in the holy bonds of matrimony with Ella Rob-
inson, the daughter of Charles Robinson, of whose thirteen children she was
the youngest. To this union was born one child, Elizabeth Elleanor, who,
after completing a good education in the common schools, became assistant
postmaster at Shreve, which position she retained until her marriage to
Charles W. Keister. They now live at Toledo, Ohio, and have one child,
Housel. Mr. Housel is an ardent Republican in politics and has rendered his
party effective service as a member of the county and township central com-
mittees, in which positions he served many years. He also served as clerk of
the township. On May 16, 1889, under the administration of President
Benjamin Harrison, Mr. Housel was appointed postmaster and served a full
term, his tenure of office running over into the Cleveland administration
four months and fifteen days. He was out of office three years and eleven
months and then was reappointed to the office on September 1, 1897, and
retained the office continuously until September 30, 1909, having served alto-
gether as postmaster sixteen years, five months and a half and during all
this long time Mr. Housel was never away from the office for one whole day
at a time. He is an accommodating and obliging official and has given the
patrons of the office a very satisfactory administration. Fraternally he is a
member of the Royal Arcanum. He is public spirited and gives his support
to every movement that promises to be of benefit to the community, having
served two terms as a member of the school board and in other local offices.
He is a man of marked ability and integrity of character and because of this
and his genial manner towards his acquaintances he occupies an enviable posi-
tion in the community.
ASBURY B. OLDROYD.
The first half of the nineteenth century was characterized by the emigra-
tion of that pioneer element which made the great state of Ohio what it is.
These immigrants were sturdy, heroic, upright, sincere people, such as con-
stitute the intrinsic strength of a commonwealth. It scarcely appears proba-
ble that in the future history of the world another such period can occur, or
indeed any period when such a solid phalanx of strong-minded men and he-
roic, self-sacrificing women will take possession of a new country. Too care-
ful or too frequent reference can not be made in the pages of history con-
cerning those who have figured as the founders and builders of a great com-
monwealth, and in connection with this brief review of the personal history
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
of Mr. Oldroyd it is a privilege to touch incidentally and specifically upon
interesting data in regard to the sterling pioneer family of which he is a
member and which has been identified with the annals of the Buckeye state
since an early period in the last century. The subject is known as one of the
influential and worthy citizens of Wayne county, where he has passed prac-
tically his entire life and because of a life which has been characterized by
unimpeachable integrity and upright living he is eminently deserving of the
high position he holds in the community.
Asbury B. Oldroyd, who owns and operates a fine and fertile farm in
section 14, Clinton township, was born May 10, 1842, on a farm located across
the road from where he now lives. He is a son of Henry and Hannah
(Ebright) Oldroyd. The latter was a daughter of George Ebright, who
came in a very early day from Pennsylvania and settled in Plain township,
Wayne county, Ohio, where he lived until his death, which occurred in 1863.
While still living in Pennsylvania he was drafted for service in the war of
1812, but secured a substitute. However, the latter got only as far as Pitts-
burgh, when the news of the close of the war was received.
The subject's paternal grandfather, Charles Oldroyd, was a native of
Yorkshire, England, and was a fuller by trade in his native country. At that
time it was the policy of the English government to prevent mechanics from
emigrating, so he was compelled to leave the country surreptitiously. Ar-
riving in America, he located first in Cumberland county, Pennsylvania,
where for a number of years he operated a fulling mill with a gratifying
degree of success. Some time after locating there he was joined by his
wife and son, who had remained in England, and not long afterwards he sold
his business and in 1832, accompanied by his son, Henry, he came to Wayne
county, Ohio, making the trip afoot. He purchased one hundred and sixty
acres of land in Clinton township. During the balance of his life he was
employed in the fulling mill at Millbrook, walking back and forth to his work,
a distance of two miles. The remains of Charles Oldroyd and his wife,
whose maiden name was Jane Ellis, are now resting in the cemetery at Mill-
brook. They were faithful members of the Methodist Episcopal church and
were highly esteemed in the community.
Henry Oldroyd was born in Yorkshire, England, May 10, 1810, and, as
related above, he accompanied his mother to America to rejoin the husband
and father, who had preceded them to this country. In 1832 Henry accom-
panied his father on the trip to Wayne county, Ohio, and here he followed
the pursuit of agriculture all the remaining days of his life. His early years
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here were characterized by much labor of the hardest kind, the land which his
father entered having been covered by the primeval forest growth, which
must be removed before the crops could be planted. Eventually he witnessed
the wonderful transformation which transpired in this section and realized
for himself the fruit of his labors. His death occurred in Shreve, this
county, and his wife died in Kansas, their remains being interred in the Oak
Grove Cemetery at Shreve. They were prominent and active members of the
Methodist Episcopal church. To them were born a number of children,
namely: Mariah, \vho died young; Elmer George, who now resides at Shreve,
was a soldier in the Civil war, serving three years as a member of the Four-
teenth Regiment Iowa Volunteer Infantry; Charles W., who now lives at
Ottawa, Kansas, served three years during the Civil war as a member of
Company C, Sixteenth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, entering as an or-
derly sergeant and being honorably discharged with the rank of first lieuten-
ant ; Asbury B. :s the immediate subject of this review ; Wilbur Fisk, de-
ceased; Thomas B., who resides at Arkansas City, Kansas. Henry Oldroyd
was a stanch and uncompromising Republican in his political views and was
a strong supporter of the government during the Civil war.
Asbury B. Oldroyd was reared on the old homestead in Clinton town-
ship and early became accustomed to the strenuous labor of the farm. He
secured his education in the schools of the neighborhood, and it is related that
when he was learning his A B Cs his mother cut the letters out of paper
and pasted them on a paddle, which he carried to school with him. The sub-
ject assisted his father on the home farm until 1861, when he enlisted in
Company C, Sixteenth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He rendered
faithful and valiant service to his country, but, owing to continued ill health,
he was given an honorable discharge from the service about eighteen months
after his enlistment. Since that time he has contirtuously applied himself to
agricultural pursuits, in which he has met with splendid success. His fine
farm in Clinton township is numbered among the best in the township and
is so conducted by Mr. Oldroyd as to insure a handsome income each year.
The property is well improved with substantial and attractive buildings, these,
with the well-tilled fields and other features of a modern farm, standing in
marked evidence of the progressive character of the owner. In addition to
raising all the crops common to this section of the country, Mr. Oldroyd
also gives considerable attention to the raising of livestock, which he has
found to be a profitable and valuable adjunct to the regular farm work. In
politics Mr. Oldroyd has at all times given a firm allegiance to the Republican
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
party and has taken a keen interest in its success, though not ambitious for
office. Fraternally he is a member of the Shreve Post, Grand Army of the
Republic, in which he has served as senior vice commander.
Mr. Oldroyd took unto himself a helpmeet in the person of Tamer
Kean. The latter was a daughter of William Kean, who was bom in Mif-
flin county, Pennsylvania, six miles east of Lewistown, on January 12, 1805.
He was a son of Joseph W. Kean, who left Mifflin county in 1815, and went to
Beaver and Allegheny counties, that state, where he remained for six years.
In 1821 he came to Plain township, Wayne county, Ohio, where he remained
until his death in 1826. William Kean was but twenty-one years of age
when his father died and he gave to his mother the most careful and loving
attention until her death, which occurred in 1836. He then went farther
west in search of a location, but became dissatisfied and returned to Wayne
county. He was married January 13, 1831, to Elizabeth Case, a daughter of
Augustus Case, of New Jersey, who settled in Plain township, this county, in
the spring of 1831. Augustus Case was bom on Long Island, New York,
July 17, 1759, and in childhood moved to New Jersey with his father, Joshua
Case. The latter was the son of Augustus Case. Mrs. Kean’s father, Au-
gustus Case, Jr., learned the carpenter’s trade and was employed at that vo-
cation in New York city and in the shipyards until 1777, when he enlisted
for service on behalf of the colonists. He gave faithful service throughout
the war, but took part in no battles, having been, because of his proficiency
as a workman, assigned to special work along the line of his trade. It
is a matter of record that he performed some very important service for the
cause which he had espoused. In 1794 he was married to Elizabeth Bell, a
daughter of Onisimus Bell, and born in New Jersey May 19, 1765. In 1798
they crossed the Alleghany mountains to Washington county, now Greene
county, Pennsylvania. In the fall of 1813 he started afoot westward and, ar-
riving in Plain township, Wayne county, Ohio, he entered the northwest
quarter of section 31. He then started on the return journey and on the way
he also entered land in Richland county, this state. He arrived at his Penn-
sylvania home January 1, 1814, and immediately made arrangements to move
to the new western home. The household goods were packed in a big cov-
ered wagon, drawn by an ox team, with a horse hitched to the end of the
tongue. They started on the long and wearisome journey, he and the older
children walking most of the way. They arrived at Wooster on the 25th of
April, 1814, and there the family remained a short time, while the father
was engaged in the erection of a small log cabin on the Plain township
land. On its completion, they occupied it and the parents there spent the
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775
remainder of their lives. The wife and mother did not live long in the new
home, her death occurring September 12, 1817. Her husband survived her
many years, his death occurring March 24, 1852. Mr. and Mrs. Kean were
the parents of the following children : Dewitt C. ; Sophie, the wife of Ed-
win G. Ebright, of Clinton township, this county; Anner, who makes her
home with the subject and his wife; Augustus C., who resides at Shreve; John
was a member of Company A, One Hundred and Twentieth Regiment Ohio
Volunteer Infantry, during the Civil war, and died while on board a boat
at Young’s Point; Tamer, the wife of the subject. William Kean was a
prominent man in his day and served two terms as trustee of Plain township,
having also held every other office in the township excepting that of consta-
ble. He died in March, 1884, and his wife Elizabeth in December, 1883, their
remains being interred in the Maple Grove cemetery in Plain township. To
Mr. and Mrs. Oldroyd have been bom the following children: Lura, at home;
Emma, at home; Bessie is the wife of George William McCluggage, of Clin-
ton township, this county, and they have one child, Ruth; Mabel, at home;
Sophia, deceased ; Helen and Gerald are at home.
JOHN W. CRUMMEL.
An enumeration of those men of the present generation who have won
honor and public recognition for themselves, and at the same time have
honored the locality to which they belong, would be incomplete were there
failure to make mention of the one whose name forms the caption to this
sketch. During a number of years he sustained a very enviable reputation
in educational circles and, now, in the responsible capacity of clerk of East
Union township, he is rendering signally useful and efficient sendee to his fel-
low citizens.
John W. Crummel is a native son of the township in which he now re-
sides, his birth having occurred at Apple Creek, East Union township, Wayne
county, Ohio, on the 7th day of October, 1852. He suffered the loss of his
mother when he was a very young boy and he then was placed in the family
of W. W. Wyer, who gave to him the same care and attention that an own
father and mother could have done. The subject secured his elementary ed-
ucation in the district schools of the neighborhood, which was supplemented
by attendance at the Smithville Academy. He then engaged in teaching
school and in this effort he achieved a pronounced success, being occupied
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
in this profession for many years in this county. In 1881 and 1882 he at-
tended the law department of the Michigan State University at Ann Arbor,
Michigan, but on his return he resumed his pedagogical work, which he con-
tinued until 1895. He was then engaged in clerking in various mercantile
houses until 1898, when he was elected clerk of East Union township. So
efficient were his services in this position that he has been retained in it ever
since, and is the present clerk. The duties of the position are manifold and
are in some respects onerous, but Mr. Crummel has handled the details of
the office in such a manner as to win the approval of his fellow citizens.
On the 6th of November, 1883, Mr. Crummel was united in marriage
to Ella M. Hough, a sister of Isaac N. Hough, the present auditor of Wayne
county. The union has been without issue. After their marriage Mr. and
Mrs. Crummel lived for awhile at Honeytown, where Mr. Crummel was en-
gaged in teaching, but they are now residing at Apple Creek, where, in their
pleasant and attractive home, they give a hearty welcome to all their friends.
In politics Mr. Crummel is a stanch Democrat and gives an enthusiastic
support to his party. Mrs. Crummel is an earnest and devoted member of
the Methodist Episcopal church, to which society Mr. Crummel gives gener-
ously.
Mr. Crummel takes a deep and abiding interest in the progress and im-
provements in the schools and in all matters pertaining to the welfare of
his community. He belongs to that class of substantial citizens whose lives
may not show any meteoric brilliancy, but who, by their support of the moral,
social and political movements for the general good of the community are
deserving of the commendation of all good citizens. A man of genial per-
sonality and integrity of life, he has won the unbounded confidence of all
who know him and as a representative citizen of his township he is entitled
to representation in a work of this character.
WARDEN WHEELER.
The office of biography is not to give voice to a man’s modest estimate of
himself and his accomplishments, but rather to leave on the record the verdict
establishing his character by the consensus of opinion on the part of his neigh-
bors and fellow citizens. In touching upon the life history of the subject of
this sketch the writer aims to avoid fulsome encomium and extravagant praise;
yet he desires to hold up for consideration those facts which have shown the
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c-i > m ili - rowny. In 18S1 and i be at -
ha- V; r/ayui Sane M’dce’ouy at 1 t A > lv •
' ; ,ic rr nmed hu p<-< iayopa a! work, winch Ik* o -n
• ; ■ t on e.a o ed ’ ti 'h-rk.rp in various niercavtia
■ »' - w a he n ■ Jeri; of Ihut l non |(>unk:,;i. S< *
. . ■ ■• - ! i To ; .''•■•?! > liat In.* ho keen retained in it eve-
. f - P ous . T t rites mi do portion are mamf-hd md
- : : k 1 * , \ ! r. ( ruinmT has handled the detaiN « t
.!.* t*r a the annta »\ a! of hi| fellow citizens.
■ . A nc e . ’..ST, Mi*, 'hummel was unite,! in marrio-
. ■ a si'* ..ar ;\ . ] : ■ne’fi, t " , c are out a editor of \\ \ i \ ■ i • -
.**•. -a Ir ' * .* , - ih 'lit ome. Afar thor marriage ,M r. an-t
*' ‘ ’ m : livui r , at I i oneytow n . when. Mr. (hummel was en
... i : icy h- o now oThm: lI \pp!e ( re'-k. where, in tho:
I e.< * ' Woy yu\e a hc;t’ ;y wthome to all their fnctnK
' ■■ o . T : o a stanch Memorial and ^pves an enthusiastic
* I’ninic! is an earnest and. devoted member of
1 ‘ 1 a m \M 'eh s ciety Mr. Crummel qhves p'ener-
. ^ merest m the ;»r. ^ress and it:
m pertaimny to the we! low- of
; ' • ; miotanaal citizens whose la es
- a . . * . ’ a who, hy their -airport of the moral,
*• on! ■ ■ o !• ‘ a l naval tood of the community are
■ e o: r\'i !*■ a ’ ’ '■ v da.ion » t ad tpoo<t citizens. A man of genial per-
sonaiitv am 1 ; .;*;*; of iitc, he has won the unhoundeai confidenee of all
who knew i-hu rmd as a repi esentat i\ e citizen of his township, he is entitled
to represent v t n m a work of this character.
WARid'N \\ HERT.KR.
The i >thee of liMpraphy is not to oive \ oice t- > a man’s no ,v>t estimate • f
lntr.M’lf and hn tu*o X1 n.j M ’•iiments. hut lather to li ra on the :*econl tile \'erd:e*
e' ’'ddishii o' ho f o 'aoer ! \ tin* oiiisoiMis ot f 'pinion or. the part of his rah/
if r- ;md teiloa c- Ir toiu lunp* upon the life liutorv of the snhnvt . •*
hi : - o eW . -o* ..,mu u » ?\ < ed fui>< sue ercourum and ret \\\\ apant prai-«
\ef ht doio } : e«j> tor e* n-ideration those facts which ha\e how n t
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
777
distinction of a true, useful and honorable life — a life characterized by per-
severance, energy, patriotism, broad charity and well defined purpose. To do
this will be but to reiterate the dictum pronounced upon the man by the people
who have known him long and well.
Warden Wheeler is a native son of the old Buckeye state, having been
born at Zanesville on the 23d of November, 1833. He is a son of Benjamin
and Eleanor (Warden) Wheeler. The family for several generations have
been residents of Ohio, his paternal great-grandfather, Moses Dillon, having
died at Zanesville at the age of ninety-seven years. The paternal grandpar-
ents were natives of Baltimore county, Maryland, and there the father, Ben-
jamin Wheeler, also was born in 1802. The subject's mother was born in
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and is closely connected with an interesting bit
of pioneer history. Her mother and children were at one time captured by
the Indians, but succeeded in escaping and hid themselves in a school house,
where they escaped detection. Benjamin Wheeler left his native state in 1820
and came to Zanesville, Ohio, making the trip by horseback, and there he be-
gan working as an ox-driver for the Dillon Iron Works. In this humble ca-
pacity he was faithful and industrious and was promoted from time to time
until he became manager of the entire plant. Subsequently he started the
Zanesville Foundry and Iron Works, which he conducted with considerable
financial success until advancing age suggested to him the wisdom of retiring
from active commercial life. Selling his manufacturing interests, he invested
in bank stock, which enabled him to live a retired life free from worry or busi-
ness care. His death occurred in 1874. He was also a large owner of farm
lands, which required much of his attention. During his active years he was
considered one of the most public-spirited men in Zanesville, giving his support
to many enterprises which promised to be a benefit to the community. He
was also very charitable, doing much in the way of benevolence, but was unos-
tentatious in his manner of giving, and many of his acts of benevolence never
came to public notice. In politics he was first a Whig, but after the forma-
tion of the Republican party he gave that party his unreserved support. His
widow survived him a number of years, dying in 1884.
Warden Wheeler was reared under the parental roof and secured his pre-
liminary education in the Zanesville public schools, supplementing this by at-
tendance at Marietta College, at Marietta, Ohio. He was not permitted to
graduate at this institution, however, ill health forcing him to relinquish his
studies. Upon recovering sufficiently to take up active work, he became a col-
lector for the Adams & Wheeler Iron Works, at Zanesville, in which his
father was interested. Subsequently, however, he became possessed with a
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
desire to take up agriculture and, with this end in view, he went to where is
now located the city of Rochelle, on the line between Lee and Ogle counties,
Illinois, and in 1853 entered eighteen hundred acres of government land. In
the following year he returned to Zanesville and drove overland to his new
land a herd of cattle, the trip requiring about six weeks. Mr. Wheeler con-
tinued his farming operations in Illinois until 1862. He has taken an active
and intelligent interest in the trend of public events and was deeply concerned
in the great struggle which ensued between the great political parties just prior
to the Civil war. He cast his presidential votes for Fremont and Lincoln and
was intimately associated with several of the great political leaders of Illinois,
including Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. At the outbreak of the
war he was in a mind to enlist for military service, but his father, to prevent
him doing so, persuaded him to return to Ohio and take charge of a farm in
Morgan county. The Wheeler family were of patriotic blood, and several
members took an active part in the great and bloody struggle. A brother of
the subject, Samuel H. Wheeler, was captain of Company A, Twenty-fourth
Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and was at that time the youngest and
smallest captain in the service. He was injured in the battle at Cheat Moun-
tain, West Virginia, and was brought home, dying soon afterwards. Another
brother, Robert F. Wheeler, gave up his life at the battle of Shiloh, and a
brother-in-law, Capt. T. C. Ewing, of Ewing s Battery, was shot through the
body at the battle of Rocky Ridge, West Virginia, being afterwards captured
by the enemy. The subject could not restrain his patriotic ardor and enlisted
for service, and was sent to Knoxville, Tennessee, as master of transportation
in General Burnside's army. He remained there during the siege of that
city, and was then prostrated with an attack of typhoid fever, being sent home
to recuperate as soon as well enough. On his recovery he was commissioned
quartermaster of the Eighth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Cavalry, this appoint-
ment coming to him entirely without his application, and he served in this
capacity until the close of the war. His command was a part of Sheridan’s
cavalry at the battle of Opaken, Fisher's Hills, and the advance to Stanton, be-
sides other minor engagements. The command returned by the Urah valley
when the Shenandoah valley was devastated, and the subject was detailed
by General Sheridan to go to Martinsburg and bring the whole army train
from that point to Cedar Creek. In following out this order, they had reached
Winchester, near Cedar Creek, when they heard the firing at the latter place.
The train was at once started for the front and when they had reached the
Stone Mill, four miles from Winchester, General Sheridan, who had spent
the night at Winchester, overtook Mr. Wheeler and ordered him to park his
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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train on the left of the road. The subject then asked permission to go to the
front and try and save the brigade train, and was told to do so. He rode for-
ward with Sheridan several miles and then struck off to the left and eventually
was able to save the brigade train intact. This act was of greatest importance
to the army at that time and the subject Was highly complimented by his su-
perior officers and promoted to the rank of first lieutenant. He saw much
arduous service during the remainder of the war and was always found at the
post of duty. At the close of the war, Lieutenant Wheeler received an ap-
pointment as quartermaster with the rank of captain in the regular army, but
he declined the commission, having no desire for military service in the time
of peace.
On leaving his country's service, Mr. Wheeler went to Amesville, Athens
county, Ohio, and entered the mercantile business, in which he continued until
1869, when he moved to Pike Station, now Creston, Wayne county, and has
since made that his home, having in the year mentioned retired from active
participation in commercial life. In March, 1870, he was commissioned a
notary public, having been the first person in Canaan township to receive this
appointment. He served awhile as postal mail agent on the Wheeling & Lake
Erie railroad, but was caught in a wreck and badly bruised.
Mr. Wheeler has enjoyed the acquaintance and companionship of a num-
ber of Ohio's foremost citizens and some of them men of national importance.
He was a personal friend and admirer of William McKinley and in his home
was held the first meeting of the congressional commission preceding the first
election of McKinley to Congress. The district was then composed of Ash-
land, Wayne, Stark and Portage counties and among the men who composed
that campaign committee were such well-known men as Cornelius, Colonel
Hard and Smyser, of Wayne county, Robinson, of Portage county, and others
who have been political leaders in their communities. For several years Mr.
McKinley was an annual visitor to the home of the subject, their intimacy
having begun when they were comrades together in the army, both being
assigned to General Crook's staff. Mr. Wheeler was also well acquainted with
Rutherford B. Hayes and James A. Garfield, the latter having served in the
same brigade with the subject's brother-in-law, Gen. Samuel A. Gilbert.
When the subject was a lad of seven years Gen. William Henry Harrison was
entertained in his father's home, and he also gained the personal acquaintance
of Thomas Ewing, Thomas Calling and S. S. Cox. He also remembers seeing
Henry Clay and Gen. Zachary Taylor while they were on a steamboat trip up
the Ohio river. Mr. Wheeler took a great interest in the early improvements
of Ohio public highways and public works and was a member of the first
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
party to travel by rail from Zanesville to Bellaire. After his removal to Cres-
ton and the incorporation of that place, Mr. Wheeler was elected the first
mayor and gave to the new corporation effective service.
On the nth of August, 1858, Mr. Wheeler was united in marriage to
Mary B. Smith, who was born at Bartlett, Washington county, Ohio, the
daughter of Milton and Susan Smith, old settlers of that county and who later
came to Wayne county, where they spent their remaining days. Mrs. Wheel-
er's grandfather and grandmother came to this country with Blennerhassett,
who settled on Blennerhassett ’s Island. To Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler two chil-
dren have been born, namely : Charles, who was born in Illinois, was for
twenty-five years a conductor in the passenger service on the Northern Pacific
railroad, and served as one of the presidential electors from North Dakota
during William McKinley’s first campaign. Benjamin Wheeler, who also was
born in Illinois, is engaged in the grocery business at Orrville, this county.
Both of these sons have married, and a grandson of the subject, B. F. Wheeler,
married, in July, 1909, Sallie A. Royer, of Orrville.
Mr. Wheeler has been successful in life to a high degree and is recognized
as one of the county's best citizens. He is well known and is highly respected
by every one. He is now nearing the golden sunset of life and in the course of
nature must in a few years take his departure, but he rests in the assurance
that his life has been well spent and that he has honored the name which he
bears* being the peer of any of his fellow citizens in all that constitutes upright
living and correct citizenship. He is a close and intelligent observer, has
read much, and keeps himself well informed on current events. He is unos-
tentatious in manner and quiet in demeanor, a thinker, and a man of deeds
rather than words. He is essentially a man of the people, because he has large
faith in humanity and is optimistic in all his views. The high esteem in which
he is held by the people of his community is a worthy tribute to a most excel-
lent man and his name will always occupy a conspicuous place on the roster of
Wayne county's representative citizens.
ELMER BROWN.
From his boyhood the subject of this sketch has been a resident of
Wayne county, and he is an honored representative of one of its pioneer
families. His life has been one of usefulness and honor, and his memory
links the later pioneer epoch, with its comparatively primitive surroundings
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
781
and equipment, with this later era of prosperity and opulent achievement
and condition which have marked the advent of the glorious twentieth cen-
tury. As a representative farmer of the county and a public-spirited citizen,
it is entirely consonant that there be here entered a review of the life history
of Mr. Brown.
Elmer Brown, whose fine farm is located in section 10, Clinton township,
Wayne county, was born August 8, 1857, a son of Thomas Ashford and
Mary (Bird) Brown. Thomas Ashford Brown was a son of John Buckner
Brown, who was the second child and oldest son of Thomas and Ann (Ash)
Brown. John Buckner Brown was born January 28, 1788, in Prince William
county, Virginia. In the spring of 1805 he accompanied his father and
family west of the mountains to what is now known as Preston county. West
Virginia, locating on what was called the ‘‘Stone House” property, consist-
ing of five hundred and seventy-eight acres. About five years later, at which
time he was twenty-two years of age, he married Mary Morgan, who lived
on the east side of the Cheat river, near Kingwood, West Virginia. She
was a daughter of Hugh Morgan, one of the pioneers of Preston county,
West Virginia. She was born May 12, 1790, and was the fourth in order
of birth in a family of ten children, nine of whom were girls. She was a
quiet, Christian woman, of many excellent personal qualities, an excellent
housekeeper and a faithful and loving mother. In the summer of 1811
John Buckner Brown came to Wayne county, Ohio, and entered land in
section 20, Clinton township, on which he made some improvements. He
then returned to his family in West Virginia, and in the fall of 1813 he
brought the family to their new western home, arriving here on the 17th of
September. The tedious journey required several weeks* time, during which
time the members of the party were in constant danger from various sources.
The trip incurred many hardships, the trail leading through unbroken forests
and over bridgeless streams, while on every hand roamed bear, wolves,
panthers, catamounts, wild red deer and wilder red men. The party arrived
safely at their destination and at once the task was begun of getting the land
in shape for cultivation. One who has not passed through this experience
can have no definite idea as to the extent of the task. The timber had to be
felled, chopped and burned, the ground broken, crops planted, fences built
and other labor performed which was not incumbent on those who later took
up the operation of the farms. These sturdy old pioneers did their work
well and today they deserve the everlasting gratitude of those who are now
enjoying the conditions made possible by their sacrifices and strenuous labors.
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John B. Brown continued to reside on this farm until their deaths. His
death occurred September 15, 1855, and hers on July 12, 1850, their remains
being interred in the old Baptist cemetery in Holmes county, near their
home. Mr. Brown was a member of the Disciples church and the first
meeting ever held by that denomination in Wayne county was held in his
home. Mr. Buckner was said to have been a man of fine personal appear-
ance. He was five feet eight inches in height, weighed one hundred and
sixty pounds, and had bright blue eyes and dark brown hair. He bore a
splendid reputation in the community, his word being considered literally as
good as his bond. At the time of the death of his father he received as his
portion of the estate three or four slaves. Being bitterly opposed to the
practice of slavery, he returned to Virginia, and hired out one of them, Rafe
Harris, to Gen. Buckner Fairfax, for a term of six years, at the end of
which time he and the other slaves were to be given their freedom, which
was done. Politically, Mr. Brown was a Democrat until the campaign of
1840, from which time he gave his support to the Whig party. To him
and his wife were born the following children: Ann, born November 28,
1811, died August 12, 1812; George Harrison, born April 4. 1813, died
1844, married Rebecca Hull; William Wesley, born March 23, 1815, died
in June, 1893, married Phoebe Lee, who was born April 6, 1837, the daugh-
ter of James Lee, of Virginia, and died July 17, 1886; Hugh M., born
October 14, 1816, married, on February 21, 1838, Margaret Neely, who
was born June 25, 1819, and both are now deceased; Rebecca Ann, bom
February 25, 1820, died in infancy; Thomas Ashford, born June 22, 1818,
married Mary Bird March 5, 1845, and both are dead; John, born October
25, 1822, died April 19. 1889, married, in 1848, Rhoda Newkirk, who also
is dead; Mercy, born December 19, 1823, died in infancy; Stephen, born
August 8, 1826, now deceased, married, on January 31, 1850, Martha M.
Riffle, also deceased, and had three children, Plerbert, G. E. and Alice (Mrs.
Kick) ; Mary Ann, born August 25, 1828, became the wife of James K.
Campbell on February 13, 1851, and both are deceased; Isaac, born April 3.
1831, married Elizabeth McConkey on February 13, 1851, and is now
living in Holmes county, this state; Samuel Elery, born August 12, 1833,
married Almira Caldwell November 4, 1854. He is now dead and his
widow lives in Nebraska.
Of these children, Thomas Ashford Brown, father of the subject of
this sketch, became a well-known and highly respected farmer of Clinton
township. O11 March 5, 1845, he married Mary Bird, who was a native of
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
783
Holmes county, Ohio, and to them were born the following children : Rals-
ton Buckner, bom January 28, 1846, died 1902, married Sarah J. Gill,
February 25, 1869, she being now a resident of Wooster, this county;
Bird Ashford, born February 25, 1848, died April 29, 1877; Salina J., bom
September 12, 1849, became the wife of J. J. Sullivan on September 27,
1887, and they now reside in Cleveland, Ohio; Luderna died young; Mina
J., born July 29, 1853, was married, on November 27, 1873, to W. C. Craig,
of Wooster; Aurelia M., born August 29, 1855, married, on October 6, 1876,
Lucustus Sidle, and they live in Wooster; Elmer, the subject of this sketch,
was the next in order of birth. He was reared on the paternal homestead in
Clinton township and received his education in the common schools. He
was reared to the life of a farmer and has spent his entire life as a tiller
of the soil in this township. He has been energetic and progressive and
has so operated his farm as to realize a gratifying return for the labor
bestowed. The place is well improved in every respect and is numbered
among the best homesteads of the township. In addition to the tilling of
the soil, Mr. Brown also devotes some attention to the breeding and raising
of livestock, in which also he is successful.
Mr. Brown married Ida Dike, who was born June 18, 1871, in Plain
township, this county, a daughter of Andrew and Barbara (Kugler) Dike.
Her parents were both natives of Germany, haying emigrated to the United
States in 1851. The father was a blacksmith by trade, but here followed
farming as an occupation. He died September 2, 1901, at the age of
seventy-nine years, and his widow now makes her home with the subject
and his wife, being now eighty-four years old. To the subject and his
wife have been born the following children: Helen, born July 17, 1899;
Mary, born October 6, 1903. Mr. and Mrs. Brown are members of the
Christian church, both giving their earnest and liberal support to this society.
In politics Mr. Brown has given his support to the Republican party, though
he is not in any sense an aspirant for public office. Standing “four square
to every wind that blows,” he has so ordered his life as to win the unbounded
confidence of all with whom he has had dealings and his friends are in num-
ber as his acquaintances.
DAVID G. EVANS.
D. G. Evans, son of James Evans, a pioneer settler, was born in Baugh-
man township, April 4, 1833. At the close of his country school days he
served as a dry goods clerk in stores at Dalton and Massillon, after which
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
he was engaged in various pursuits in Illinois and Missouri. At Springfield,
Illinois, as bookkeeper in a large dry goods house, he was personally ac-
quainted with Abraham Lincoln. He returned to Orrville in i860 and
engaged in the drug and grocery business.
He was joined in wedlock to Mary Jane Taggart, daughter of Robert
Taggart, one of the pioneer settlers of Baughman township and Orrville.
Mary Jane died one year before her husband. He died in 1901 and left
no children. He was known as one of Orrville’s most strenuous and enter-
prising business men.
ROBERT C. FLACK.
Back to stanch old Scotch-Irish stock does the subject of this sketch trace
his lineage, and that in his character abide those sterling qualities which have
ever marked these two nationalities is manifest when we come to consider
the more salient points in his life 'history, which has been marked by consecu-
tive industry and invincible spirit, eventuating in his securing a high place in
the confidence and respect of his fellow men.
Robert C. Flack is a native son of the Buckeye state, having been born
near Homesville, Holmes county, on February 8, 1866. He is the son of
James and Isabelle (Dorvacter) Flack. James Flack, who also was a native
of Holmes county, was a farmer by profession, and moved to Wayne county
in 1866. when the subject was but six weeks old. He located one-half mile
south of Maysville, where he resided until his death, which occurred in 1894.
The father was twice married. His first wife was Sarah Riddle, who was born
in Knox county, this state, and to them were born three children, of whom
only one is living, Thomas J. Flack, now living near Gambier, Knox county,
Ohio. Isabelle Dorvacter who became the second wife of James Flack, was
born in Muskingum county, Ohio, and her death occurred in 1898. She be-
came the mother of seven children, who are briefly mentioned as follows:
Robert C., the subject of this sketch; John J., who lives four and a half miles
southeast of Wooster; Ora O., who is connected with the experimental sta-
tion work of the government horticultural department; Celia M. is the wife of
Harry J. Jolloff, of Wooster; Charles S., living two miles northwest of Woos-
ter; Ida V., of Wooster; two, Marion and Mary Ann., died in infancy. The
subject's paternal grandfather, James Flack, was a native of Pennsylvania,
and came to Ohio in an early day, being one of the highly respected pioneers of
his locality.
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! V . O H IO.
( i i
- . ' - w and Missouri. At Spnne • e-hi,
l, >* d'o ^ "»ih Mooe, he wa- pers< Hally w-
lie tetnmed to Orrvilh* in iSno and
*■■ w bus,nr>s
A ■ k i«» M up I ;; '1 Adrift-. 'laughter of Robert
r: v-n!t is • ! ! > m:- hn cm township and < > r t \ ^ 1 lo .
;• h. ; ■ ^ ! ► ; 1 1 o K lie bile! in l go I an*! h O
n .i ■ ; ■ o ' *i r, ille’s n i» kremions and tntrr-
o i' < TMU K.
* k • o ■ 1 'di stock •; .i s the subject nf this skekh t once
; *.'U *- abac* those Aerhipa (juahues w hich ha\e
* • . -t’hie‘s is mano'est w hen we cane to consider
: - i v histoio. which has been ma'ked by consent
- ’ - :t, e\ eWo.o n ijp in his securing a find] place tn
; , ■ - len' » a ; acn.
^ •- ■” • : ihe ihckrvc state. having b< • > A, at
: • a h'.enarv S, I boo. i le is Me s, n « » f
■ - 1 . k I nnes Mack. win. aho was a native
. k > ■ a v t> "ii'-c-'ii. end nooed to Who nr oto
, • ‘ 1 • ■ « ■ ' . w; six wnk> old,, lit* Me, it.* t ini'll. ill mde
-o 'h f« 'o. ' M<-u c ■ ■ sided mail his death, winch occurred in
i'-’O, ,k.» . o ' \\ a'e n un .ed. I 1 o tir>t w i te w as Sarah Uidd'e. w ii< • w a> hi >rn
in i\;c>\ w-nniy, this state. and to Mem wa re born Mine children, of w lorn
t no uni' i- living, d Renas J. hunk. now 1 i \ m t lu-ai Mambur. Knox eonmv.
Mhio. Is.iIkUc Dorvackr win* iocnn the aroul wile of James black. was
li irn in \\ mb m^mn comity, ( MM, and her death ^coined in iS->S. She be-
came the mother of seven c1 iidren. w no are brnMy wwniioiRd as MlMw-:
Ruber* (\, t be snkiect of this sketch ; John J.. v la * hv es f« nr am] a half imlo
southeast of \\{u)st-T; ( . h a ( k. who is connected with the expenmewd sta-
tion W'ck .a' the government ii* >ri icnlt meal department; Mena ki. is the \\Oe . »t
I ! arrv ] JolMtt . of Wmsiir; ( !o, rh*s S.. h\ mp two mile- n» >rt 1 1 w est of \\ . o-
ter : I la Y . o>' Wooster: tw c kaiion and Mary Amo, dik'd m intanev. The
snhje-oA looin'd e i a ml fat her. lames Fkuk. v.;n- a name of ! 'eim-\ ! \ ni; a
.m 1 ennx ! ’ i J iio in an early dnv. h anp -me or t lie hi ah!\ respected pi< n<-t -
hi- Moh'.W
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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As stated above, the subject of this sketch was brought to Wayne county
by his parents when he was but six weeks old, and this county has been his
home continuously since. He remained on the parental farmstead during
his boyhood years and received a good education in the common schools of
the locality. He continued to assist his father in the duties of the farm for a
number of years and then entered the insurance business, working fraternal
insurance and giving his attention principally to the Bankers’ Fraternal Union.
He then took up old-line insurance and for eight years was with the John Han-
cock Company, one of the strong and reliable companies. In this line of work
Mr. Flack achieved a distinctive success, being considered one of the leading
insurance men in this locality. He practices correct business methods and has
won the confidence and esteem of all with whom he has transacted business.
R. C. Flack is at present engaged in the field of investments, in which he
negotiates bonds, stocks and other first-class securities, making a specialty of
western investments because of their larger profit return on invested funds. In
this field he has been exceptionally successful, having influenced the invest-
ments of many thousands of dollars of Wayne county capital. He is a director
of the Colusa Mining & Milling Company, operating rich gold properties in
the Tarryal district, Park county, Colorado, and a director of the Ohio Quartz
Hill Gold Mining Company, operating valuable gold properties on Quartz
Hill, which is generally recognized as the richest square mile of gold producing
territory in the world. Judge L. M. Goddard, for twelve years associate jus-
tice of the supreme court of Colorado, with other influential persons of that
state, are officers and directors of this company. Mr. Flack’s offices are in
the Nolle building, Wooster, Ohio. Mr. Flack is heavily interested in other
legitimate enterprises of the west, among which are the Stoughton Mining &
Milling Company and the North Star Tunnel, Mining, Milling, Power &
Transportation Company, both mining enterprises of a profitable and success-
ful business character.
On August 31, 1887, Mr. Flack wedded Priscilla B. Hoagland, of Dan-
ville, Knox county, Ohio. She is a daughter of Stephen A. Hoagland, of
Knox county, and is descended from a family of soldiers, five of her father’s
brothers having served throughout the Civil war as members of the Northern
armies. To Mr. and Mrs. Flack have been born the following children :
Elmer C., now seventeen years of age, has completed his common school ed-
ucation and is now a student in Bixler’s Business College, at Wooster ; Hazel
V., aged thirteen; Urshel E., aged ten years; Genevieve, aged five years;
Edgar V. died at the age of ten years.
( 5° )
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Socially, Mr. Flack is a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fel-
lows, both subordinate and encampment, the Knights of Pythias, in which he
has risen to the Uniform Rank, the Modern Brotherhood of America and the
Home Guards of America. In politics he is a stanch Democrat, though not an
aspirant for the honors or emoluments of public office. Religiously, Mr. and
Mrs. Flack and their children, Elmer and Hazel, are members of the Chris-
tian church, to which they give a generous support. The subject is one of the
county’s public-spirited citizens, and he has so ordered his life as to command
unequivocal confidence and esteem in the county where he has passed prac-
tically his entire life. He is widely and favorably known and has co-operated
earnestly in every movement which he believed would advance the general
welfare and progress of the county.
OHIO J. HARRISON.
As a representative of one of the pioneer families of Wayne county
and as one who has here passed his entire life, it is certainly consistent that
we enter in this work a review of the career of Mr. Harrison, who has
long been identified with the agricultural and stock-growing interests of the
county, having a fine estate in Franklin township and being honored as one
of its representative men. He is a native of the township in which he now
maintains his home, having been born on the old pioneer homestead on the
9th of January, 1852. He is a son of William and Mariah (Criswell) Har-
rison. His paternal grandfather was William Harrison, who was born on
the Harrison homestead in this township in 1823 and lived here all the
days of his life, his death occurring on the 9th of October, 1900, at the age
of sixty-seven years. His remains are buried in the Fairview cemetery at
Fredericksburg. William Harrison was a man of many excellent parts and
stood high in the estimation of the community. He was a farmer all his
life and was a practical and industrious man. His wife died on January
9, 1898. He was in religious faith a Presbyterian and took an active part
in the work of the society, having served efficiently as trustee. In matters
political he was affiliated with the Republican party and took a commendable
interest in local public affairs, though he was never an aspirant for public
office of any nature. He was the owner of three hundred acres of fine and
fertile land and was very successful in his agricultural operations, being
energetic and progressive in his methods and a man of excellent discrimina-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
787
tion. He was the father of three children, namely: Ohio, the immediate
subject of this sketch; Adeline, who died at the age of six years; Gerry S.,
who resides at Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.
Ohio J. Harrison was reared on the paternal homestead and secured his
education in the schools of the township. He was reared to the vocation
of a farmer and has always been a tiller of the soil. He has always lived
in the immediate neighborhood where he now resides and has been con-
sidered one of the leading men of the township. He is the owner of a
splendid and well improved farm of one hundred and ten acres, to which he
devotes his entire attention, with gratifying financial results. His place is
well improved with neat and substantial buildings and other accessories of
an up-to-date farm and here he carries on a diversified system of agriculture,
raising all the crops common to this section of the country. In addition,
he gives much attention to the breeding and raising of livestock, in which also
he is successful.
Mr. Harrison rtiarried Margaret Moore, a daughter of William Moore,
and to them have been born two children, namely : George Clarence mar-
ried Ellen Hall, a daughter of Asa Hall, of Holmes county, and they have
three children, Margaret Helen, Wayne Hall and Dorothy Fay. George C.
Harrison served five years as a private in Company H, Eighth Regiment
Ohio National Guard. William I., the youngest son, lives at home with
his parents. Politically, Mr. Harrison is an enthusiastic Republican and is
active in the interest of his party, though not himself ambitious for the
honors or emoluments of office. Religiously, he is a member of the Presby-
terian church, to which he gives an earnest and liberal support. He is a man
of fine personal qualities and during his lifetime spent in this community he
has done nothing to forfeit the unbounded regard in which he has been held
by his friends and neighbors. He is keenly alive to the best interests of the
community and gives a hearty support to every movement calculated to
advance the moral, educational, religious or material interests of the town-
ship in which he lives.
WILLIAM S. EVANS.
William Shafer Evans, son of James and Katherine Gardner Evans,
was born on the family homestead farm in section 25, school district No. 5,
Baughman township, Wayne county, Ohio, December 23, 1843, fourth son
of his father’s family, the other children being David G., John G. and
James S. He traces his lineage back to John Evans, who was born in Wales
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
in 1724, emigrated to Pennsylvania and died in Ohio. His grandfather
(James Evans) and father were both born in Pennsylvania. The former
died on the above mentioned homestead in the year 1852; the latter died in
Orrville in the year 1887.
W. S. Evans never attended any other schools or educational institute
than the “Pokeberry” district school near the place of his birth, and it was
exceedingly primitive at that time. As early as ten years of age he gave
evidence of his journalistic or newspaper tendency in editing and reading
before the school each Friday afternoon, or literary day, an imitation local
newspaper, in which the neighborhood and school news and gossip was
presented in a semi-comical manner, which afforded much amusement to the
scholars and their parents, who would assemble to enjoy the exercises of the
occasion in the little red school from which it took the cognomen “Poke-
berry. ^ ” He was also the champion speller in the school and his elder brother
frequently carried the smaller boy on his shoulder through the deep snow
for the purpose of “spelling down” the champions in the surrounding dis-
tricts such as “Bunker Hill,” “Number Four” and “Mock’s” schools.
His first effort in writing for publication occurred when, at about nine
years of age, he conceived the idea of reporting the condition of the growing
crops and other farm news for the Ohio Farmer , then published in Cleveland.
In February, i860, his brother, D. G., opened a grocery and drug store in
Orrville and brought W. S. with him to help about the store. During the
next two years and while about the store during the day he got permission
from John D. McNulty, Orrville’s first telegraph operator, to go into the
telegraph office at night and practice the art of telegraphy. In this way he
became extra operator for the relief of operators along the line of the
Pittsburgh, Ft. Wayne & Chicago railway. In the spring of 1863 he was sent
to take charge of the telegraph office at Plymouth, Indiana, where he was
employed for one year and was returned to Orrville in 1864 and was the
manager of the telegraph office in that place for ten years, or until 1874,
when he went to Akron and spent the summer in the office of the Akron
Daily Argus, as assistant to the editor and in other office duties. Resigning
this position at Akron, he returned to the railway office and filled such
positions as telegrapher, freight office clerk, ticket, freight and express
agent, with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe; Northern Pacific; Cincinnati,
New Orleans & Texas Pacific; Chesapeake & Ohio; Chicago Great Western;
Wheeling & Lake Erie; Pennsylvania and Lake Shore & Michigan Southern
railways.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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On June 21, 1868, Mr. Evans was joined in marriage with Celia Sey-
mour Painter, adopted daughter of the late Rev. W. H. Painter, and who
is yet living. From this union one son, William P. Evans, was bom. This
son gave great promise from his very unusual mental endowment, but died
on his twenty-fifth birthday in Chicago in the year 1894 from spinal tuber-
culosis.
In the year 1866, while in the telegraph office at Orrville, the subject
of our sketch procured a small printing outfit which included a “Lowe”
press, a conical shaped cylinder, which swung around from one end and
by which he could execute various kinds of job work, such as sale and hand
bills and indifferent card printing. This was the first printing press and
outfit in Orrville and rendered much service for those days, but its work
was not fine enough for the fastidious taste of our pioneers in this line of
progressive development, so he sold it to C. M. Kenton, a printer at Shreve.
Determined upon continuing yet further efforts in the printing line our
amateur purchased a Novelty foot-power press and a nice outfit of type,
with which he turned out much of the small work in a highly creditable
manner.
In the year 1867 Mr. Evans began the publication of Orrville’s first
newspaper and on September 15th of that year he issued number one of
volume one of The Orrville Ventilator , a four-page monthly paper devoted
to the local news and business interests of Orrville, the printing being done
at the office of the Wooster Republican. This arrangement was continued
until January, 1870, when John A. Wolbach, of Wadsworth, came to Orrville
with a printing outfit of type and presses and prepared to issue a weekly
paper. On the third week of January, 1870, Mr. Wolbach issued the first
number of the Orrville Ventilator, weekly, taking the data of the monthly
} entilat or number one, volume five. In April, or three months later, the
name was changed to Orrville Crescent and Mr. Evans was continued as
local editor the first year of the issue of the weekly Ventilator and Crescent.
Mr. Wolbach is now a respected resident of Colorado Springs, Colorado.
In October, 1906, Mr. Evans was offered and accepted the editorship
of the Orrville Courier , which he held for one year, when too arduous labor
and advancing age obliged him to relinquish. He found much pleasure in
conducting its columns in accordance with his ideas of what best subserves
the requirements of a village and country weekly and made a commendable
record.
It was noticeable throughout the multiplicity of essays, editorials, selec^
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
tions and random notes that he always upheld and advocated optimism,
hopefulness, good cheer and a higher and better life. He was possessed
of a rare appreciation of genuine wit or clean, good humor and always liked
to publish anything that he thought would be appreciated and cherished by
his readers. He also nourished an inherent hatred of hypocrisy, conceit and
falsity. He was naturally of a retired, reserved disposition, but a true and
devoted friend to any one whom he believed to be honest and trying to do
what is right. If he acquired a dislike of any one it was not his disposition
to quarrel with him, but rather to let each go his own way. He was generous
to an unusual degree and would give the last cent he had to help a friend.
In politics he was an ardent Republican from the date of that party’s birth
in 1856, but did not care to indulge in political discussion, because he believed
that every man was entitled to his own opinion.
L. S. STUDER.
Holding worthy prestige among the leading business firms at Apple
Creek, East Union township, Wayne county, Ohio, is that of Studer Broth-
ers, proprietors of a thriving and important milling business, one of the best
known and most important establishments of the kind in the county. The
proprietors, L. S. and C. E. Studer, enjoy honorable reputations as enter-
prising, progressive and eminently reliable men in the lines of commerce in
which they are engaged and since locating at their present place of business
they have built up. by fair dealing and correct methods, an extensive and
lucrative patronage, which under their able and judicious management is
steadily increasing with each succeeding year.
The milling plant now operated by the Studer brothers was built about
the year 1880 and is a modern and up-to-date mill, with a capacity of one
hundred barrels in twenty-four hours. The plant is equipped with the best
of machinery and other appliances for the production of mill products and
is kept busy practically the year round. In addition to the milling business,
the firm also handles coal, plaster, lime and cement, and in these lines also
they do an immense and constantly increasing business. They carry large
supplies in all these lines and by the courteous treatment of the trade and
their fair dealing they have built up a splendid trade throughout this part of
the county. They are also heavy buyers and shippers of all kinds of grain,
handling many carloads annually. They have been uniformly successful in
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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their various lines of trade and are today numbered among the enterprising
and prosperous concerns in this part of the county.
L. S. Studer, the senior member of the firm of Studer Brothers, was
born in Tuscarawas county, Ohio, on the 19th of March, 1870, and is a
son of Edward and Mary (Zurcher) Studer. He was reared on the home
farm and received a fair education in the district schools of his native county.
In 1890 he apprenticed himself to learn the milling business at Kent, Ohio,
and served three years, during which time he made it his business to acquire
a knowledge of every detail of the work, from the handling of the grain and
the manufacture and shipping of the finished product to the keeping of mill
accounts. After the completion of his period of apprenticeship he became
a regular or “trick” miller in the same mill, holding the position four years.
He then was offered and took the management of Thompson Brothers’ mill
at Brink Haven, Ohio, and continued in this capacity for eight years. In
1905 he and his brother C. E. bought the flouring mill at Apple Creek, which
they put in first-class condition and have continued to operate it continuously
to the present time.
Mr. Studer is a benedict, having been united in marriage with Effie
Klein, who is a native of Stark county, this state. This union has been
without issue. In religion Mr. and Mrs. Studer are active members of the
Reformed church at Apple Creek, of which the subject is an elder. His
political belief is that of the Republican party, in the support of which he
takes an active part. He is interested in all that promises to benefit the com-
munity, giving his support to all worthy enterprises. In evidence of this
fact it may be stated that he is a stockholder in the Apple Creek Banking
Company, as is also his brother. Mr. and Mrs. Studer are well liked in
the community. Though they have no children, their hospitable residence
is ever open to young and old alike and within its walls the guest is sure of
a welcome such as only comes from hearts in close touch and sympathy
with what is noblest, best and most elevating in humanity.
FRANK HECKMAN.
The Heckman family needs no introduction to the readers of this history,
for members of the same have figured prominently in the life of Wayne
county for several generations. Frank Heckman, to whose career the read-
er’s attention is especially directed in the following paragraphs, was born in
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WAYNE COUNTY. OHIO.
Clinton township, this county, in 1868, the son of Henry B. and Barbara
(Jacobs) Heckman, the former a native of Pennsylvania, the latter born in
Knox county, Ohio. The paternal grandparents of Frank Heckman were
Samuel and Catherine (Grafius) Heckman. To Henry B. and Barbara A.
Heckman were born six children, five boys and one girl. The sister died
April 1, 1908.
The gentleman whose name introduces this sketch was educated in the
common schools of Clinton and Plain townships, and early in life he decided
to become a tiller of the soil and consequently he has devoted his attention
exclusively to agricultural pursuits, his wife now owning one hundred and
thirty-nine acres in Plain township, which is one of the best farms in this
vicinity and which yields its owner a very comfortable income from year to
year.
Mr. Heckman was married on April 5, 1888, to Lora Bunyan, a native
of Macon township, Ashland county, Ohio, where her people were well known.
She is the daughter of Elijah Bunyan, a leading farmer of Ashland county.
Mr. Bunyan was one of the men who made a successful trip to the gold
fields in California in 1849, and came back in 1851.
To Mr. and Mrs. Frank Heckman the following children have been
born : Howard Cuyler, Clarence Clark, Sherman LeRoy, Ralph Richey and
Earl Wayne.
Mr. Heckman has an attractively located and comfortable home and ex-
cellent outbuildings on his place and he is carrying on general farming in a
manner that shows him to be fully abreast of the times in this line. He takes
considerable interest in the affairs of his township and has been superintendent
of the township roads, discharging his duties in this connection in a very able
and conscientious manner. He is a member of the United Brethren church.
SAMUEL M. B REX X EM AX.
In the past ages the history of a country was comprised chiefly in the rec-
ord of its wars and conquests. Today history is largely a record of com-
mercial and financial activity and those whose names are foremost in the an-
il ds of the nation are those who have become leaders in business circles. The
financial and commercial history of Orrville. Wayne county, would be incom-
plete and unsatisfactory without a personal mention of those whose lives are
interwoven closely with the industrial and financial development of this portion
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
793
of the state. When a man, or a number of men, set in motion the machinery
of business, which materializes into many forms of practical utility, or where
they have carved out a fortune or a name from the common possibilities, open
for competition to all, there is a public desire which should be gratified to see
the men as nearly as a word artist can paint them, and examine the elements
of mind and the circumstances by which such success has been achieved.
These thoughts are prompted by reference to the lives and works of him whose
name appears as the caption to this article and his father, both of whom have
exerted a wide-felt and wholesome influence on the growth and development
of Wayne county.
The subject’s paternal grandfather was Adam Brenneman, a native of
Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, who came to Wayne county, Ohio, in about
1832, and nobly performed his part in the development of this section. He
was the father of a large number of children, nearly all of whom remained in
this county and became prominent and respected citizens, so that it has been
aptly said that the history of this part of Wayne county is a history of the
Brenneman family. The subject’s parents were Jacob and Nancy (Martin)
Brenneman. The latter was a native of Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, and
is still living at the old homestead in Orrville, which was erected' in 1874.
Jacob Brenneman, who was born in Pennsylvania, accompanied his father to
Wayne county in the thirties, and during the subsequent years he occupied a
conspicuous place in local business circles. He was a pioneer in commercial
enterprises and a man of large influence. In 1859 he came to Orrville and the
following year he built a store building and entered the dry goods business,
in which he was successful from the beginning, continuing this line until 1867,
when, on account of ill health, he retired to his farm. Five years later he re-
turned to Orrville and erected the building now occupied by the Orrville Sav-
ings Bank. About 1868 the Brenneman & Hoist Exchange Bank was organ-
ized and he remained identified with this institution until 1876, when he with-
drew. In 1881, with the subject of this sketch, he organized the Orrville Bank-
ing Company, with which he was identified until his death, which occurred in
1885. He was a larger holder of landed interests and was a heavy dealer in
grain, owning a warehouse for its storage. He was a Mennonite in religious
belief and was a man of sound moral principles and sterling integrity, in
whom the people with whom he dealt had absolute confidence.
Samuel M. Brenneman, who was born in Baughman township, Wayne
county, February 12, 1855, attended the schools of Orrville and Wooster, and
subsequently matriculated in the law department of the University of Mich-
igan, at Ann Arbor, where he was graduated in 1880. He was a member of
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794
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Sigma Chi fraternity. The following year he was interested with his father
in organizing the Orrville Banking Company and was identified with it until
1892. A few years later he organized the Orrville Savings Bank, of which he
is the proprietor. The banking room was first located in what was then known
as Dr. D. L. Moncriefs office and moved into its present convenient and well-
arranged quarters in 1905. The bank has been prosperous from its inception
and is counted among the prominent and solid financial institutions of the
county. Mr. Breneman is also proprietor of the Rittman Savings Bank, at
Rittman, this county, a private bank which was established in October, 1907.
In 1886 Mr. Brenneman was united in marriage to Maria Orr, a daughter
of the late Judge William M. Orr and a granddaughter of the founder of
Orrville, Smith Orr. She was a native of Wooster and was a most estimable
woman, possessing many qualities of character which commended her to all
who knew her. Her death occurred on January 5, 1909. To this union were
born two daughters, Charlotte and Maud, both of whom are students at
Wooster University and popular young ladies among their associates.
In politics Mr. Brenneman is identified with the Republican party, in
the success of which he takes a strong interest, though not in any sense an
office seeker. His fraternal relations are with the Free and Accepted Masons,
belonging to the lodge at Orrville. Mr. Brenneman is a man of strong men-
tality and keen discernment, and he commands the confidence and respect of his
fellow men because of his sterling worth of character.
CHARLES E. BURCHFIELD.
The subject of this sketch has lived what to many persons might appear
to be an uneventful life, yet to one who looks beneath the surface and seeks
the hidden springs of human action, there comes into view the intrinsic worth
of a man who has in every sphere of action in which he has engaged been
faithful to his trust, and in any line of activity faithfulness is the keynote
to success. Mr. Burchfield is well known throughout Wayne county and
everywhere his sound qualities are recognized and he enjoys the unbounded
confidence of all who know him.
Charles E. Burchfield is a native son of the old Keystone state, having
been born in Juniata county. Pennsylvania, on the nth of April, 1857. His
parents were Hiram and Sarah (Fox) Burchfield, also natives of Pennsyl-
vania, where they were married. They came to Wayne county, Ohio, in i860,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
795
when the subject of this sketch was but three years old, and here they spent
their remaining days, the father’s death occurring in 1886. He was a miller
by trade and after coming here was in the employ of the Pennsylvania Rail-
road Company at Massillon. The subject of this sketch was the only child
born to this union. After his father’s death, his mother again married and
is now living at Apple Creek, this county.
Charles E. Burchfield was reared by his parents and in his youth 'was
early inured to the labors of a farm. During his boyhood days he was given
the advantage of attendance at the common schools and secured a fair educa-
tion. In 1876 Mr. Burchfield entered the employ of Silas Moore as a grain
buyer and continued in this capacity until 1882. He then entered the employ
of the Orrville Milling Company, at Orrville, this county, in which he has
remained continuously since. He has a position of responsibility and has
performed his duties to the full satisfaction of the company. He is widely
known and has by his own efiforts brought much business to the firm with
which he is connected. He has exercised a wise economy and has exercised
sound judgment in his investments and is now the owner of two good resi-
dence properties at Apple Creek, which are a source of income.
In 1879 Charles E. Burchfield was united in marriage with Ida Hough,
a sister of Isaac N. Hough, the present auditor of Wayne county, and to
them have been born three children, namely : Earl, who is deceased ; Maude,
the wife of Delano Moore, of Akron, Ohio; Mabel, who died at the age of
seventeen years.
Politically Mr. Burchfield gives an unqualified support to the Republi-
can party and takes a keen interest in the trend of public events. He is an
influential worker in the ranks of his party, but is in no sense a seeker after
office or public preferment. Fraternally he is a member of Apple Creek
Lodge No. 674, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, and Apple Creek Lodge
No. 374, Knights of Pythias. He has passed the chairs in both of these sub-
ordinate bodies and is a member of the grand lodge in each order. His re-
ligious belief is that of the Methodist Episcopal church, in the Apple Creek
church of which denomination he and his wife are devoted members. Mr.
Burchfield is a leader in the work of the church and is now a member of the
board of trustees.
Mr. Burchfield has been public spirited and progressive in his attitude
towards all movements having for their object the betterment of the com-
munity morally, educationally, religiously or materially, and he has honestly
won and retains the respect of the entire community.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
ALBERT DIX.
Examples that impress force of character on all who study them are
worthy of record. By a few general observations may be conveyed some
idea of the high standing of Albert Dix, publisher of the Wooster Republican ,
as a man of affairs and a citizen, as a public benefactor or an editor of un-
usual felicity of expression, whose facile pen delights hundreds of readers.
United in his composition are so many elements of a solid and practical na-
ture, which during a series of years have brought him into prominent notice
and earned for him a conspicuous place among the enterprising men of the
county of his residence, that it is but just recognition of his worth to speak of
his life and achievements in a work of the province of the one at hand, al-
though he is conservative and unpretentious, caring little for the admiring
plaudits of men, satisfied if he is conscious of doing his duty well in the
several relations of life.
Mr. Dix was born in Portage county, Ohio, October 8, 1845. His moth-
er died when he was eighteen months of age. His father owned a small
farm of fifty-two acres, and in addition he was a stone cutter and mason,
and for years he was a stone contractor. He is remembered as a hard-work-
ing. honest and well-liked gentleman who took considerably more than a
passing interest in the development of his community.
Albert Dix Was taught the use of stone cutters tools at an early age,
and when fifteen years old he left home for the purpose of working as a stone
cutter on the New York, Pennsylvania & Ohio railroad, now the Erie. He
worked at his trade in the summer and attended select schools in the winter-
time for a period of four years. He taught school during the winter months
for a short time. When twenty-one years of age he entered a general store
in which he remained for twelve years. But not fancying the mercantile
business as a vocation he turned his attention to the newspaper field and in
1879, with C. M. Campbell, he established the Hamilton (Ohio) Daily News
and continued as manager of the same up to 1897. In 1898 he and his son,
Emmett C. Dix, purchased the Wooster Republican , which they have devel-
oped into a fine property and which has the support of the people to a large
degree. Under their management the publication took new life, the father
taking charge of the business department and the son as editorial manager,
with George Kettler in the news department. The circulation increased rap-
idly, the mechanical appearance of the paper was greatly improved, and the
Republican became much more valuable as an advertising medium which is
now liberally patronized. They have sought to keep abreast of modern
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
797
methods and they have left nothing undone to give the people what they want.
New equipment has been added and this is one of the best, if not the best,
newspaper properties in the Buckeye state of cities the size of Wooster. A
Duplex printing press has been installed, printing the paper from the roll,
thus being able to “run off” the rapidly-growing circulation within a few min-
utes. The composing room is equipped with two up-to-date linotype ma-
chines.
HUGH M. MEIER.
The record of Mr. Meier is that of a man who by his own unaided efforts
worked his way from a modest beginning to a position of comparative af-
fluence in the business world. His life has been of unceasing industry and
perseverance and the systematic and honorable methods which he has fol-
lowed have won for him the unbounded confidence of his fellow citizens of
Apple Creek and East Union township.
Hugh M. Meier is a native son of the county in which he now resides,
he having first seen the light of day at Fredericksburg, Wayne county, Ohio,
on the 29th day of April, 1870. He is a son of James and Eliza (McCul-
lough) Meier. The father died September 19, 1907, while his widow now
lives on the home farm. James Meier was a native of Switzerland, having
been born April 8, 1836. He was reared and educated in his native land and,
des;ring larger opportunities for advancement, he came, in i860, to the United
States. He came at once to Holmes county, Ohio, where he was married.
He was a shoemaker by trade, and was considered a proficient workman, but
later in life he took up farming, of which he made a success. He was a poor
man when he first came to this country, but at his death he was conservatively
estimated to be worth twelve thousand dollars. He Was a member of the
Lutheran church and was highly respected throughout the community where
he lived. James and Eliza Meier became the parents of fifteen children,
named as follows: A. J., G. E., W. H., Lucinda, Hugh M., E. B., I. V., John
F. (deceased), Cornelius, J. M., Mainard, C. W., Etna, Joseph and Virgil.
It is a remarkable fact that of this large family only one has died, and all
of the survivors are prosperous and most of them heads of families.
Hugh M. Meier was reared under the parental roof and secured his ed-
ucation in the district schools of the neighborhood. He remained at home,
assisting in the work of the farm until he was twenty-five years old, when,
taring of an agricultural life, and believing he could do better along another
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
line, he learned the trade of a harness-maker, at which he has worked contin-
uously since. On March u. i8c8, he located at Apple Creek and since that
time he has been numbered among the enterprising and successful merchants
of this place. The quality of his work and his courteous and accommodating
treatment of his customers has resulted in attracting to his shop a full share
of the trade in his l:ne and he is handling a nice business which is increasing
steadily year after year. He carries in stock everything pertaining to harness
supplies, such as robes, blankets, whips, etc., and is eminently deserving of
the large patronage which is accorded him.
In January, 1897, Mr. Meier married Emma Keister, a native of Holmes
county, Ohio, and to them have been born three children, namely : Ralph M.,
born July 25, 1898; Stewart J., born July 27, 1901, and Pearl M., born April
14, 1904. In religion Mr. and Mrs. Meier are faithful and consistent mem-
bers of the Presbyterian church, to which they give an earnest and generous
support. Fraternally he is a member of the Knights of the Maccabees, while
his political affiliation is with the Democratic party. He has taken a deep
and commendable interest in local public affairs and was elected mayor of
Apple Creek, in which position he served from 1900 to 1905, giving a strong
and business-like administration. He is now serving as chairman of the
water works board, and is rendering efficient service. In the fall of 1909 he
was elected treasurer of his township. A few years ago five public-spirited
citizens of Apple Creek organized and incorporated the Franklin Union Tele-
phone Company, the incorporators being J. E. Frank, John Tate, F. R.
Beazell, Alvah Eyman and Hugh M. Meier. There are now fifty stock-
holders in this company and Mr. Meier is serving as treasurer.
In this necessarily brief review of the life of the subject enough has been
said to indicate to even the casual reader the leading characteristics of the
man. Wide awake to his best opportunities, with a candor and courage that
has enabled him to take advantage of them, he has gone forward, step by step,
until today no man in the community where he lives enjoys a larger measure
of popular regard than does he. A man of acknowledged ability, absolute
integrity in word and action, and of courteous manner, he has no trouble win-
ning friends, which are in number as his acquaintances.
HARRY KOUNTZ.
Back to stanch old German stock does Harry Kountz trace his lineage,
and that in his character abide those sterling qualities which have ever
marked the true type of the German nation, is manifest when we come to
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
799
consider the more salient points in his life history, which has been marked
by consecutive industry and invincible spirit, eventuating in his securing a
high place in the confidence and respect of his fellow men.
Harry Kountz is a native son of Wayne county, having been born on
West North street, Wooster, on the ioth of August, 1862. He is a son of
George Harry and Jane (Gregor) Kountz, the former of whom was bom at
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 22, 1842, the latter the daughter of
Jacob and Catherine (Hill) Gregor, of Franklin township, Wayne county,
Ohio. Her parents, who are both deceased, were born in Pennsylvania and
came to Ohio and bought land when the locality was still inhabited by In-
dians. Mr. and Mrs. Kountz were married on March 19, i860. The sub-
ject’s paternal grandfather was Michael Kountz, a native of Baden, Ger-
many. He was a boilermaker by trade and came to the United States with
his wife in 1825, locating at Pittsburgh, where he was employed at his trade
and where he and his wife spent their remaining years and died. Their son,
Harry Kountz, father of the subject, was reared in Pittsburgh and se-
cured a fair education in the public schools of that city. He learned the
trade of a painter and in 1859 he came to Massillon, Ohio, where for about
a year he was engaged at his trade. In i860 he came to Wooster and in
1863 he enlisted for service in defense of his country. He proved a brave and
valiant soldier and received an honorable discharge at the end of his period
of enlistment. After his return he was employed at his trade by the McDon-
alds until 1875, when he ceased that line of work and moved onto a farm
which he owned in East Union township. The farm comprised about forty
acres and he devoted himself with success to its operation. He is now de-
ceased, but his widow is still living. They were the parents of twro children,
Harry, the subject of this sketch, and Alice, who remains unmarried.
Harry Kountz, Jr., was reared principally on his father’s farm and he
possesses a practical knowledge of agriculture, having been his father’s as-
sistant in that work. He received a good education in the common schools
of the township, and has liberally supplemented this by much close reading of
the world’s best literature as well as the current periodicals of the day, so
that today he is considered an unusually well informed man. He has been pros-
pered in all his undertakings and is now the owner of a fine farm of one hun-
dred and thirty-five acres in East Union township, besides residence property
in Wooster. He is a heavy stockholder and general manager of the Wayne
County Telephone Company, besides being a stockholder in three mining
companies. Mr. Kountz is of an inventive turn of mind and has secured
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
several patents on devices for leveling purposes, a number of which he has
sold. His devices have been pronounced by good authorities as possessing
considerable merit and indicate the patentee to be a man of practical ideas.
Mr. Kountz is wide awake and progressive in his makeup and gives an un-
qualified support to every movement having for its object the upbuilding of
the community, morally, educationally, socially or materially. His public-
spirited attitude has given him prestige in the community and he occupies
an enviable standing among his fellow citizens.
In matters political Mr. Kountz has always given an ardent support to
the Republican party, and has rendered effective service to his party in the
capacity of committeeman. He has not, however, been a seeker after office
or public preferment of any nature. In every relation of life in which he
has been placed, the subject has proven faithful to his duties and obligations
and because of his business ability, personal qualities and unimpeached integ-
rity he enjoys the unbounded confidence of all who know him.
COL. CURTIS VOLOSCO HARD.
A citizen of the United States can wear no greater badge of honor than
the distinction of having faithfully served the government in the war between
the states. It is a sacred family inheritance of renown, to be prized like a
jewel by all future descendants and kept bright and untarnished by other acts
of valor, patriotism and loyalty in the interests of free government. But the
ranks of the old phalanx are rapidly going down before the only foe that they
could not meet, and ere long none will be left to recount the actual experiences
of those stirring times that tried men's souls. In the meantime, while they are
still with us, let us pay suitable honor to their sacrifices, patriotism and suffer-
ings. Col. Curtis V. Hard, whose life record is briefly outlined in the follow-
ing paragraphs, is one of the brave heroes of the great Northland who gave
up the pleasures of home, business and society, and through many a trying cam-
paign and bloody battle risked life to save the honor of the old flag. Not only
in his military life has this gentleman distinguished himself, but since its close
his private and public life have been such as to gain for him the distinction of
being one of the most distinguished citizens of Wayne county, Ohio. He is a
native of Wooster, having been born here August 3, 1845, the son of Moses
Knapp Hard, a native of the adjoining county of Medina, to which vicinity
the paternal grandparents of Colonel Hard came from Vermont in 1816 when
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: vp. t ol. (Vna d. 1 w lr*w li!e record is brief v < ml hned in ;he follow -
me p.iragrapr.-, is one of the hra .e Ivov- « ,t the great Northland wh< > pave
n]) I he pkawiuo of lionie, business and o k ;etv. and thn mgh in *nv a tr\ hip e : i
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
801
this country was a wilderness and wild beasts roamed through its jungles, and
the tracks of the red men had scarcely faded from the primitive soil. The an-
cestral lines on both sides of the house extend far back in the annals of Amer-
ican history. On the fathers side several members of the family bore arms
in the struggle of the colonists for independence, having been with the famous
Ethan Allen at the storming and capture of Ticonderoga. New York. Orig-
inally the family stock was English, having come to America about the middle
of the seventeenth century and ever since that time to the present day members
of the same have distinguished themselves wherever they have dispersed,
whether in public or private life. Moses K. Hard, father of the Colonel, grew
to manhood in his native county, where he was educated, and he directed his
attention for a time to the study of medicine, but later entered the ministry, in
which vocation he spent twenty-five or thirty years, winning a wide repuation
as a pulpit orator of rare force and earnestness, doing a great work for the
establishment of the Gospel throughout this part of the state. He married Mi-
randa Booth, a native of Medina county, and to them six children were born.
They permanently located in Wooster in 1870 for the purpose of spending
their declining years in retirement.
Curtis V. Hard received the advantages of the common schools of his
native town, later entered Berea College, near Cleveland, then returned to
Wooster, where his subsequent life has been spent. In 1864, while yet a boy,
he enlisted in the One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Regiment Ohio Volunteer
Infantry, which formed a part of Sheridan’s army in the Shenandoah valley.
After a very creditable record as a soldier he received an honorable discharge
in 1865 and returned home. In 1866 he became identified with the banking
house of Bonewitz, Emrich & Company, which in 1867 was reorganized into
the Commercial Bank of Wooster, and at its re-organization into the National
Bank of Wooster in 1871, with David Robison, Jr., as president, he became
the cashier of the institution, remaining in that capacity until April, 1898,
when he resigned to take his regiment into Cuba.
Colonel Hard did not allow his patriotism and love for military life to
wane after the close of the Civil war, but remained active and as a reward for
his industry and fitness he became a lieutenant-colonel of the Ohio National
Guard, and in 1898 during the Spanish-American war he became colonel of
the Eighth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, his regiment being the onlv
one from Ohio which had the distinction of seeing active service in Cuba.
During that brief but decisive war. Colonel Hard added fresh laurels to his
military fame.
(50
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Colonel Hard is associated with the Cleveland & Wooster Electric Rail-
way in the capacity of manager, whose exacting and responsible duties he
discharges with rare business foresight and judgment, having been very large-
ly instrumental in making this enterprise very successful. He has won a
high standing in both business and social circles in Wayne county which he
has honored with his citizenship during nearly the entirety of his life. He
promoted the Cleveland, Ashland & Mansfield Traction Company, and was
connected with it until its completion in April, 1909. Colonel Hard was in-
strumental in the organization of the Wooster Electric Company which fur-
nishes light, heat and power for Wooster, the first of the kind in northern
Ohio outside of Cleveland, and of which he is the largest stockholder and
its manager and treasurer. He is also president of the Cleveland Light and
Power Company, the largest independent lighting company in that city. He
played an active part in inducing the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to enter
Wooster and was very largely instrumental in inducing the board of control
of the Ohio agricultural experiment station to locate at Wooster.
Colonel Hard was married in 1870 to Addie Jackson, daughter of Cyrus
Jackson, a prominent citizen of Wayne county. Mrs. Hard received a liberal
education and was a teacher in the Wooster public schools. To this union
four children have been born, namely: Dudley J. Hard, of Cleveland; Emily
L. Hard; Agatha G. Hard, now Mrs. Willard Ohliger, of Detroit, and Miriam
B. Hard. Mrs. Hard died April 6, 1910.
Politically the Colonel is a Republican and active in the ranks. He is a
Knights Templar Mason and belongs to the Grand Army of the Republic.
He is a man of exceptional business qualifications, having the fine military
bearing of the true soldier, and socially he is a polite, cultured gentleman.
P. S. BLOSSER.
The county of Wayne numbers among its citizens many skillful physi-
cians, lawyers of state repute, well-known manufacturers and business men
of much more than local reputat:on ; while proud of them, she is not lacking
in others which have achieved distinction in callings requiring intellectual
abilities of a high order. Among the latter, P. S. Blosser, of East Union
township, occupies a deservedly conspicuous place. No one is more entitled
to the thoughtful consideration of a free and enlightened people than he
who shapes and directs the minds of the young, adds to the value of their
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
803
intellectual treasures and moulds their characters. This is pre-eminently the
mission of the faithful and conscientious teacher and to such noble work has
the life of the subject of this sketch been largely devoted.
P. S. Blosser is a native of Paint township, Wayne county, Ohio, having
been born on the 9th day of January, 1850, and is a son of Christian and
Susan (Ruegsegger) Blosser. These parents were natives of canton Berne,
Switzerland, though they were not married until after they had come to
the United States. Christian Blosser accompanied his parents to this coun-
try and the family settled in Paint township, Wayne county, where they lived
many years, the father and mother dying there. The father bought eighty
acres of farming land and carried on agriculture during his active years.
Christian was eighteen years old when brought to this country and he was
reared on the Paint township farm, eventually becoming one of the prom-
inent and well-known farmers of that section. He was seventy-five years
old at the time of his death, which was caused by injuries received from a
hay hook. He was a man of splendid qualities and his death was considered
a distinct loss by the entire community. He and his wife were the parents of
twelve children, namely: Susan, John, Mary, Elizabeth, Christ C., P. S.,
Louise, Caroline, Matilda and William. Of these, the two last named are
deceased, and ten of the surviving members of the family are respected resi-
dents of Wayne county.
P. S. Blosser was reared to the life of a farmer and during the years of
his youth he assisted his father in the farm work. In the meantime he at-
tended the common schools during the winter months and proved such an apt
scholar that, upon examination, he was granted a license to teach. In this
profession he at once scored a distinct success and such was the prestige he
gained as an instructor that for twenty-eight successive terms he was en-
gaged to teach in his immediate neighborhood, certainly a most emphatic
testimonial to his professional efficiency and his worth as a man. In 1892
Mr. Blosser became the Democratic candidate for commissioner of Wayne
county and at the ensuing election he was elected. He assumed his official
duties on the 1st of the following January, and so satisfactory were his serv-
ices that he was re-elected to the position, his second official term expiring
September 19, 1899. He proved a most able and efficient officer, ever hold-
ing the best interests of the people at heart, and he retired from this responsi-
ble position with the approval and good will of all the people. During his
administration the recent county jail was erected and many other permanent
and substantial improvements were made throughout the county, especially
pertaining to public highways and bridges.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Mr. Blosser is the owner of one hundred and ninety-one acres of fine
land in East Union and Saltcreek townships, to which he devotes his atten-
tion during the summer, teaching school during the winter months. He has
ably and honestly performed his full duty in whatever position he has been
placed and no man in Wayne county occupies a more exalted position in the
minds of those who know him.
In politics Mr. Blosser is an ardent Democrat and has ever been actively
interested in the success of his party. Besides the official preferment already
referred to, Mr. Blosser has given efficient service as justice of the peace in
both East Union and Saltcreek townships. His religious membership is with
the Reformed church at Apple Creek, to which he gives an earnest and cor-
dial support. Fraternally he is a member of Apple Creek Lodge No. 324,
Knights of Pythias, in which he has passed all the chairs, being now a mem-
ber of the grand lodge.
On the 24th of January, 1876, Mr. Blosser was united in marriage to
Emmeline Tracy, who was born in East Union township, the daughter of
Jacob and Phoebe Tracy. These parents bore the distinction of having been
the first settlers in East Union township, they having come here in 1814.
The land which they entered at that time is now the farm owned by Mr.
Blosser and is considered one of the best estates in the township. To Mr.
and Mrs. Blosser have been bom the following children: Louella G., born
October 25, 1876, is the possessor of a license to teach; Harry C. ; Rev. M.
E., who received a splendid secular and religious education and is now occu-
pying some of the best pulpits of the Methodist Episcopal church in the West ;
Cleveland graduated from the civil engineering course at the Ohio Northern
University at Ada and is now a successful teacher; C. M. graduated in the
public schools at Apple Creek in 1909; three children are deceased.
DAVID D. ARMSTRONG.
At this point we are permitted to touch upon the life history of one who,
if for no other reason, merits recognition in this connection by reason of his
having been a lifelong resident of Wayne county and a representative of
one of the sterling pioneer families of this .section of the state. But super-
added to this circumstance are others which render the appearance of his
biography within these pages all the more consistent, for he has here attained
a position of prominence in connection with the agricultural activities of the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
805
county and is honored as one of the upright, genial and whole-souled citizens
of his native county, having a fine farm home in East Union township, the
same being the center of a most cordial hospitality.
David D. Armstrong was born in the township in which he now resides,
on May 5, 1842, and is a son of Robert and Mary (Hunter) Armstrong.
Both of these parents were natives of Beaver county, Pennsylvania, where
they were reared. The:r marriage occurred after they had removed to this
county. Here the father bought a farm of one hundred and thirty acres,
for which he paid the sum of eight hundred dollars, and in this connection
it is interesting to note that the same land is today worth at least one hun-
dred dollars an acre. At the time of purchase the land was densely covered
with the primeval forest growth, and the first thing done by the pioneer was
to clear a small place in the forest and erect a little log cabin, which, though
rough in appearance and probably inadequately furnished, proved a sufficient
shelter for the happy family which came to brighten the pioneer home.
The land was all eventually cleared and was developed into a splendid and
fertile farm, which approved the wisdom of the father in seeking the loca-
tion. In this little home there were born ten children, of whom the three
sons were David D., of this review, Samuel, who now lives in the state of
Washington, and Joseph, of Wooster township, this county.
David D. Armstrong was reared in the parental home and in the winter
months secured a fair education in the district school, which at that early
day was somewhat primitive in methods and equipment. When he was but
eight years old his father died and there devolved on him much of the labor
and responsibility of the farm. It was hard work and at times it seemed as
if it would be necessary for the children to separate, but by persistent energy
and wise management the mother and the subject were enabled to weather
the storm and eventually prosperity rewarded their efforts. David remained
at home until he was thirty-four years old, at which time he was married.
He was at that time the possessor of six hundred dollars, and during
the first year after his marriage he rented a farm. Afterwards he came in
possession, through his wife, of one hundred and thirty acres of what was
known as the old Brown farm, which she inherited from her father, the
tract being devoid of any improvements. He at once went to work and in
due time developed the place inter one of the choice farms of the township.
He erected a full set of commodious and well-arranged farm buildings,
including an attractive residence situated about a half mile back from the
highway and most beautifully situated. He has here carried on general
farming operations and has been highly successful. He raises all the crops
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
common to this section of the country and also devotes considerable atten-
tion to the raising of livestock, in which also he has been prospered. He is
up-to-date and progressive in his ideas and keeps in close touch with the
latest ideas relating to agriculture, not hesitating to adopt that which has
been demonstrated to be superior to old ideas and methods.
In 1876 Mr. Armstrong was united in marriage to Emma J. Brown,
the daughter of Amos Brown, of East Union township, and to them have
been born three children, namely: Willis married Della Schultz and lives at
Kent, Ohio; Nellie L. is unmarried and lives with her father; Mabel died at
the age of three years. Mrs. Armstrong died in June, 1899, since which
time the daughter Nellie has devoted herself to her father's care and comfort.
In religion Mr. Armstrong is a faithful and consistent member of the
Presbyterian church, of which he has served as an elder for more than thirty
years. He is a man of honest convictions and in harmony with his views on
the temperance question he gives an ardent support to the Prohibition party,
believing that the temperance question is the greatest and most important
issue now before the American people. He is held in the highest esteem
in his native county and is known as an able business man and as one whose
probity is above question.
LEVI F. HOSTETLER.
The subject of this review is one who is to be individually considered as
one of the representative citizens and successful farmers and stock growers
of Wayne county, and, in a more abstract sense, as a member of a family
whose history has been honorably linked with this section of the Buckeye
state for many decades. The fine farm property of our subject is located in
Greene township and with its admirable improvements and general air of
thrift well deserves mention as one of the model homesteads of the county.
Levi F. Hostetler was born in Greene township, Wayne county, on No-
vember 14, 1872, and is the fourth in the order of birth of the eight children
born to David and Barbara (Yoder) Hostetler. David Hostetler was born in
Wayne township, Wayne county, Ohio, March 10, 1839, and is a son of Chris-
tian and Elizabeth (Yoder) Hostetler. Christian Hostetler was born in Penn-
sylvania in 1800, as was his father, John, before him. David was reared un-
der the parental roof and educated in the common schools. He followed
farming operations throughout his life until 1906, when he gave up active
farm work and moved to Weilersville, where he now resides.
In 1864 David Hostetler married Barbara Yoder, who was bom in
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
807
Wayne county January 2, 1841, and to them the following children were
born: Malinda, the wife of M. W. Hurst, of Baughman township; Samuel,
who died at the age of four years; Elizabeth, who died at the age of two
years; Levi F. married Amanda Steele and lives in Greene township, and is
the immediate subject of this sketch; John married Anna Longenecker and
lives in Greene township (see sketch elsewhere in this work) ; Amanda died
at the age of twenty-two years; David died at the age of ten years; Minnie
is unmarried and lives with her parents. Religiously the family are mem-
bers of the Mennonite church, and of this society David Hostetler is an active
member, having been ordained to this sacred office in 1872.
Levi F. Hostetler remained with his parents until he was twenty-one
years old and in the meantime he secured a good common-school education.
After attaining his majority he took up the carpenter’s trade, at which he
worked for some time, and he was also in great demand during the autumn
as a thresher, having a complete outfit for this purpose. After his marriage,
which occurred in 1896, he operated rented land for two years, and then
bought a small tract of land, which he cultivated a short time, afterward
going into the grain business at Smithville, Ohio. In 1908 he purchased the
John Funk farm in Greene township and is now giving his undivided attention
to its cultivation. The place comprises one hundred and thirty acres and is
considered one of the best pieces of land in the township. Mr. Hostetler has,
since buying the place, erected a set of fine new buildings, commodious and
well arranged, and now the property will compare favorably with any other
in the vicinity. Besides the cultivation of the soil Mr. Hostetler also gives
considerable attention to the feeding and selling of livestock, giving special
attention to heavy draft horses and sheep, in which line he has been very suc-
cessful.
In November, 1896, Mr. Hostetler married Amanda Steele, the daugh-
ter of Isaac Steele, and to this union have been born four children, namely:
An infant that died unnamed; Harry, born February 1, 1898; Edith, born
August 12, 1900; Glenn, born January 31, 1904.
In matters political, Mr. Hostetler renders allegiance to the Republican
party, and he takes a commendable interest in the public affairs of his com-
munity, though he is not in any sense a seeker for public office. In religion
the family are members of the Mennonite church. He is justly accorded a
place among the prominent and progressive representative citizens of Wayne
county, for he belongs to that class of men whose enterprising spirit is used
not alone for their own benefit. He is a man of cordial disposition and makes
friends of all with whom he comes in contact.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
EDWARD M. QUINBY.
Edward M. Quinby was of distinguished parentage. His grandfather,
Ephraim Quinby, was an early settler of Trumbull county, Ohio. He laid
out the town of Warren, the county seat, was judge of the court in that county
and one of its prominent citizens. His grandfather, on his mother's side,
David McConahay, represented Wayne county in the Legislature of Ohio in
1825, and was associate judge. He lived in the family residence in Wooster
on South Market street, built by him, until his death. Ephraim Quinby, Jr.,
came to Wooster from Trumbull county and was married to Catharine Mc-
Conahay, of which marriage Edward M. Quinby was the only child, and was
born February 21, 1851, in the McConahay homestead.
Ephraim Quinby, Jr., the father of the subject of this sketch, had all the
strength of character of the Quinbys and, combined with the high standing
and intelligence of the McConahays, invested their only son with as splendid
an intellect as Wayne county has given birth to. This ancestry has a physical
dignity, stature and beauty, that so greatly distinguished their son. The
father, Ephraim Quinby, Jr., was a wise and prudent man, acquired a large
fortune, mostly in real estate, located in many of the western cities, but largely
in Wooster, which was improved by him and constituted very largely the first
steps of progress of this beautiful city. The University of Wooster received
its first impulse in 1868, when he gave twenty-one acres of land upon which
the college is located; he contributed additionally to the endowment of the
university; he established the Wayne County National Bank, which yet ex-
ists as one of the most prominent banks of the city. The subject of this
sketch inherited the example, benevolent spirit and business talent of his
father, as well as his fortune, and the estate grew into its present mammoth
proportions under the management of the great son of his father. As soon
as his age would permit, his education commenced at the private school of
Mrs. Pope, was continued at Dennison College, Granville, Ohio, and then at
Kenyon College, Gambier. Ohio. He soon commenced a business career, in
which he was engaged when, on October 17, 1878, he was married to Amelia
C. Schmertz, of Pittsburg. Pennsylvania, who was the eldest daughter of
William E. Schmertz, of that city, who was then a member of the Board of
Commerce, president of the Second National Bank, and one of the largest
boot and shoe manufacturers in the country. She was also the granddaughter
of Rev. David Kimerer. one of the pioneer ministers of Wooster, a noted
orator, highly respected, and he was such a grand old man that the people
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. . of • h-tmpuis] sed panmlape. 1 i i ^ grandfather
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■ . mnl\ -eat, was juupe of the court in that uuni;,
* . . . e u > . Il'X piumd father, on his mother's side.
■ muted \\ a; ne cr-imiv in the Legislature of Ohio in
, ' - luupe. ]h heed in the family residence in \\ ooxut
(• t, huhi lain, ;mn] Ins death. Kphraun Ooinhx, lr..
'•■mi Hs-mCdl c * * n : ’ t \ and married to Catharine Mc-
< marmm I'd ward h. Outnhy \\a> the unlv chdd. and wa-
ji. iS;t. in tiie dd ou.diay homes! end.
* i unhv. jn. the had-ei of the subject of tin’s sketch, had all the
• air tcier of the (Juinh x and. c^mlmied. with the Inch >tnmhnp
' m’ c of the Xiei h i i a ’ a -, mvmted their onlv -on wall as splendid
a \\h \ i a* cottony i , a s ph m himh to d his anccsti y has a pin -sal
u m-d houM. th;u -o pnnuh < nsiinpuishod their ^m. The
!: . a i a a i-e anal pmient man, acquired a la:a;c
• i '•.aim main d tiu* western cities. hut Ur pci v
>n hen and c -iis ; ‘ and very la rye1}' the tir-t
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J w < mu ' - • . -arTum; udditdmullv to tlie endtowment of the
e, mmitm he tm o the \\ m nr Counts Xuoowal Lank. whan \ O ex
pi- as ne of mm* most pmuiiuem Tmk> of tlie chy. The >nh_i<*-' t of o
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f a he- a- .'. el! a - .u > thtitunc. a ■; the c-aue prew into its present m:n mi- eji
pr »p sM. m dr the t:o n op : went of due pool s( m of Ins father. _\s >om.
■ i - Ins ape would pc ! nut im edit- at .on on in ,eno*< ] at the pm. a *■ o Too* ••
fd m Cmo mo comimied a; Ik mri-on Colicpe. CnanxilV. ()].». and then m
knivoii (. ohcpn i amhim. < >h»o. He ■>« on commenced a moiness muon. n
w In* h he \\;e up,ipd v lam -m ( k mU r it, iOT he w »• n poed to \nam .
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\\ diuun l*h N'liUMuto of ov:, (htv. vlr* w o t’nen .i ..k’iiIu r of the iha’d
1 > M'\’n c. i.r-'-h-ut -'f the Second \at: -;rd h.mk. and one of da ho.
f>o. ; ; *‘d o of- u r t.iein'er- in ti e euntrv > ie \v;n al-o i ] u :p‘a: d la,;pi *■
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■ 71--.,r. hue; o • mu-d. a;d ,u w ,t- -ueh i puual old man dmt ’’ne j-io-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
809
involuntarily raised their hats in his presence. He was a minister of the
German Reformed church. The Quinbys were of the Presbyterian faith.
The subject of this sketch was engaged in the dry goods business a number of
years, discontinuing in 1879, and engaged in the manufacture of window glass
at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, with E. C. Schmertz as a partner, which was con-
tinued from 1879 until 1884. His father having died on January 30, 1880,
the large estate left the subject of the sketch called him to Wooster. He
owned the Wayne County National Bank for a short time after his father's
death and sold it to Jacob Frick. Commencing in 1884-5, he carried out a
comprehensive plan of improvement of his real property. In the spring of
1885 he erected the Quinby block in Cleveland on the corner of Euclid and
Wilson avenues, at a cost of seventy thousand dollars, which is occupied in
part by one of the largest branches of the Cleveland Trust Company. In
1887 he erected a large four-story building on the southwest side of the public
square in Wooster, Ohio, this building being occupied principally by the
William Annat dry goods store. In 1889 he erected a building, seventy by
fifty-five feet, in the rear of McClure's store fronting on Diamond alley.
In 1890 he built a three-story building on the northeast corner of the public
square and East Liberty street, with a modern basement running the entire
length of the building; this building is occupied by the Alvin Rich hardware
store. In 1894 he built the three-story building on the southwest corner
of the public square occupied by the McClure stove and house furnishing
store.
The truth is worthy of observation that the foregoing constitute but an
imperfect schedule of the improvements that so greatly embellish his native
town, and not only illustrate the wisdom of his management but the benevo-
lence of his character. Of the many private acts of charity and benevolence
necessarily connected with a large estate, the rehearsal would not be in har-
mony with the habits or wishes of Edward M. Quinby.
The peculiar mental habits and reticence of Mr. Quinby adorn his life;
his splendid manhood was private; there was not the slightest ostentation in
any situation in which he was placed; he inherited the calm, composed, re-
flective demeanor of the Quinbys and McConahays ; he was as perfect a gen-
tleman as Wooster ever produced. Mrs. Quinby gives him the character of
a prince, so gentle, so noble, was he in all the relations of life. Intellectually,
he was the equal of the highest type of man. He was comprehensive, dis-
criminating. strong, not to be deceived, without passion, without anger, gen-
erally meeting an inadmissible proposition with a smile and a reason. He had
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
pleasant associates, was companionable with them, belonged to clubs, lived
mostly in sunshine ; was a modest man, but it was not affectation, it was a con-
trolling sense of propriety; he had a wide, modern infonnation, and surprised
one with scientific analysis, with occult suggestions. His success in his great
business affairs was phenomenal. His estate was largely increased in value;
he contributed immensely to taxation in Wooster and in the state; he was a
public benefactor; he deserved the encomiums of every inhabitant of Wooster.
To Edward M. Quinby and wife nine children were bom, as follows:
Herbert, deceased; Catherine Louise married E. P. Sturges, now deceased, of
Zanesville, Ohio; Edward M., Jr.; Eleanor married Roger W. Whinfield;
Margaret ; William E. ; Kenneth ; and Anita. To the accomplishments of
Edward M. Quinby as a native of Wooster are to be added the refinements
of travel and the broad elegance of the manners of the international life.
With his family he found a pleasant retreat in Germany, and his children, en-
tering upon a system of education there, detained him longer, perhaps, than
contemplated. To the writer he expressed the intention of returning to Woos-
ter in a couple of years. Without having time to do so, he died on the 2nd
of July. 1909. He was constantly engaged in traveling from Europe to
Wooster to see his large estates ; he improved the old ancestral home on South
Market street, and in the spring of 1909, at the hotel in Wooster, he seemed
buoyant, full of life and hope and pleased with the familiar scenes of his early
life.
EDWARD M. GRANT.
In East Union township, Wayne county, Ohio, is located the fine home-
stead farm of the subject of this review, who was one of the native sons
of Ohio, having been born in Stark county, of which his father was an early
settler. Mr. Grant was prominently interested in agriculture and the raising
of livestock and his progressive methods and discriminating judgment placed
him among the successful farmers and business men of his native county,
while he so ordered his life as to gain and retain the confidence and high
regard of those with whom he was thrown in contact. It is clearly incumbent
that a sketch of his life be incorporated in a work having to do with the repre-
sentative citizens of the county.
Edward M. Grant’s life began on the 31st of May, 1834, and he is the
son of Joseph and Elizabeth (Crawford) Grant. The paternal grandfather
was George Grant, a native of New Jersey, who moved in a very early day
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8ll
to Washington county, Pennsylvania, Joseph being then but two years old.
George Grant was a practical and energetic farmer and acquired considerable
property, being considered quite well-to-do for his day. Joseph Grant was
reared in his Pennsylvania home and received a fair education in the schools
of that state. He married in that state and in 1834 he and his wife emigrated
to Stark county, Ohio, locating on a tract of land four miles east of Mount
Eaton. There he developed a fine farm and spent the remainder of his days,
he and his wife being buried at Mount Eaton. They were the parents of
fifteen children, of whom eleven reached years of maturity, their names
being William C., Rebecca, Keziah, Joseph, Cassie J., Edward M., John A..
Jesse, Alonzo and Melissa, twins. Joseph Grant was an enterprising and
progressive man and was public spirited in his attitude towards movements
for the public good. He possessed personal qualities of a high order and
enjoyed the unbounded confidence of all who knew him.
The subject of this sketch was reared by his parents and he secured
his education in the common schools. He engaged in teaching school for a
brief period, but returned to the farm and during practically his entire life
devoted himself to the tilling of the soil, in which he was eminently success-
ful. At the time of his marriage, in 1857, Mr. Grant moved onto an eighty-
acre tract of land belonging to his father, but subsequently he moved to
Wood county, this state, where he remained a year. In 1863 he moved onto
the farm in section 21, East Union township, and which comprises one hun-
dred and twenty-three acres. He went into debt for his original purchase,
but through persistent industry, good management and wise economy he was
enabled to get out of debt. The property is splendidly improved with a
large, commodious and well-arranged residence, fine bams and other neces-
sary outbuildings, while the place is characterized by well-kept fences and
highly cultivated fields, the general appearance of the place indicating the
splendid characteristics of the late owner. Here Mr. Grant carried on a
general line of farming, in connection with which he gave some attention to
the raising of livestock, so important an adjunct to successful farming.
He was very successful as a raiser of potatoes, which acquired a good repu-
tation because of the superiority of the quality and he had no trouble finding
a ready market for his entire product.
The death of Mr. Grant occurred on April 21, 1910, at the age of
seventy-six years, and the funeral services, which were held in the Presby-
terian church, were the most largely attended of any held in the community
in many years. The floral tributes, which were numerous, were beautiful
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WAYNE COUNTY* OHIO.
in character and the general sentiment was that the community had suffered
an irreparable loss in the death of Mr. Grant. At that time the church of
which he was a member caused the following words to be published: “We
again arise for duty from the deep gloom that death has occasioned in our
midst by taking from us our fellow laborer, Edward M. Grant, who united
with the church June 30, 1863, was elected to the eldership of the church
in 1884, which position he continued to fill with faithfulness until death.
‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.’ He leaves to mourn his loss
an aged wife, now in her eighty-first year, who has been all her life a faith-
ful member, most liberal supporter and co-worker of this same church. They
are people who will be greatly missed when gone and a vacancy will be felt in
both church and community which will be hard to fill.”
On the 25th of November, 1857, Mr. Grant was united in marriage with
Permelia Harrold, who was born in 1830. No children have been bom to
this union, but Mr. and Mrs. Grant, out of the kindness of their hearts, reared
two children, Andrew Zeigler and Jennie Hayes, and to these children they
gave the same care and attention they would have given to children of their
own blood. These children are now both grown and are heads of families
of their own.
In religion Mr. Grant was a Presbyterian, holding membership in the
church of that denomination at Apple Creek, to which Mrs. Grant belongs.
Mrs. Grant donated the ground on which the church now stands. Mr. Grant
served for twenty-five years as an elder in the church and in many ways this
worthy couple showed their sincere interest in the society. In politics Mr.
Grant gave an enthusiastic support to the Republican party, in the success of
which he was deeply interested. He was a man of recognized influence in
the community and his support was always found on the side of every move-
ment calculated to benefit the community, morally, educationally, religiously,
socially or materially. His genial disposition, rugged honesty and blameless
life won for him the unbounded confidence of all who knew him.
JOHN B. HOSTETLER.
The agricultural interests of Wayne county have no better representa-
tives than its native born citizens, many of whom are classed among its
most practical, enterprising and successful farmers. One of this number is
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813
Mr. Hostetler, who is one of the prominent citizens of Greene township.
Dependent largely on his own resources from his boyhood, he has so applied
his energies and ability as to attain a success worthy the name, while his
high standing in the community indicates the objective appreciation of his
sterling character.
John B. Hostetler was born in Greene township, Wayne county, Ohio,
on the 30th of April, 1874, and is a son of David and Barbara (Yoder)
Hostetler. David Hostetler was born in Wayne township, Wayne county,
Ohio, March 10, 1839, Barbara Yoder was born in Wayne county January
2, 1841. They became the parents of the following children: Malinda, the
wife of M. W. Hurst, of Baughman township, this county; Samuel, who
died at the age of four years; Elizabeth died at the age of two years; Levi F.
married Amanda Steele and lives in Greene township, this county ; John, the
immediate subject of this sketch; Amanda, who died at the age of twenty-
two years; David, who died at ten years of age; Minnie, who remains single
and is living at home.
John B. Hostetler was reared at home and grew in close acquaintance
with the routine life of a farm. As soon as old enough he took upon him-
self his share of the labor during the summer seasons, while during the
winters he attended the common schools. He had a marked talent for music,
which he studied much at home and also took one term of musical instruc-
tion at Wooster University. During the greater part of five years he was
engaged in teaching singing classes, and along this line was quite successful.
After he had attained his majority he started out in life on his own account
and has followed the pursuit of agriculture continuously since. He is now
the owner of the old Longenecker farm, comprising one hundred and forty-
four acres of fine land situated in section 31, township 17 north, range 12
west. Here he carried on expensive operations in farming and stock raising,
being thoroughly equipped for both lines of activity in the way of modern
machinery and permanent and substantial improvements. His fields are
under an excellent state of cultivation, good and substantial buildings adorn
the place and its neat and thrifty appearance indicates to the passer-by the
supervision of a progressive owner.
In matters of political importance Mr. Hostetler gives his support to the
Republican party, and his religious preference is indicated by his membership
in the Mennonite church.
On November 28, 1897, Mr. Hostetler married Anna Longenecker, who
was born in 1877 in Greene township, on the farm on which she now resides.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
She is the daughter of S. B. Longenecker. Mr. Hostetler has ever taken an
active interest in the enterprises and undertakings which have been projected
for the general good of the community and his attitude has been that of a
public-spirited and progressive citizen.
DAVID HOSTETLER.
Among the honored and venerable citizens of Wayne county is the sub-
ject of this review, who has here maintained his home for a period of nearly
three-quarters of a century, winning a definite success by means of the agri-
cultural industry, to which he devoted his attention during the long years of
an active business life. He is now retired and is enjoying that repose and
rest which are due to him now that the shadows of his life begin to lengthen
in the golden west. His career has been without shadow of wrong or sus-
picion of evil, and thus he has ever commanded the confidence and esteem
of his fellow men, his three score and ten years resting lightly upon him and
being crowned with honor.
David Hostetler was born in Wayne township, Wayne county, Ohio,
March io, 1839, and he is a son of Christian and Elizabeth (Yoder) Hos-
tetler. Christian Hostetler was born in Pennsylvania in 1800, and he was a
son of John Hostetler, also a native of the Keystone state. Christian Hos-
tetler came with his family by wagon from Pennsylvania to Wayne county,
Ohio, about 1829, and settled in Wayne township, about four miles east of
Wooster. Here he bought one hundred and sixty acres of land, nearly all
of which was densely covered with the primeval forest. This he cleared and
brought to an excellent state of cultivation, so that in the course of time it
became one of the best farms in the locality. He also acquired the ownership
of other farms and at the time of his death was considered a man of means.
He was a member of the Amish Mennonite church. He was the father of
the following children : An infant that died unnamed ; Samuel, Lydia, John,
Jeptha, Barbara, Christian, Nancy, David and Jonathan.
Of these. David was reared under the parental roof and secured his edu-
cation in the district schools of his home township. He remained on the
home farm until he had attained his majority, and then he started out for
himself, working on farms by the day and also as a member of a threshing
machine crew. He was energetic and economical and when he was married,
in 1864, he was the owner of a fine farm, which he continued to operate until
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
815
the spring of 1906, when he gave up active farm work and moved to Weilers-
ville, where he now resides. He is a quiet, unassuming man, and his life
has been so ordered as to win for him the sincere respect and esteem of all
who know him.
In 1864 Mr. Hostetler married Barbara Yoder, who was born in Wayne
county January 2, 1841, and to them the following children were born: Ma-.
linda, the wife of M. W. Hurst, of Baughman township; Samuel, who died at
the age of four years; Elizabeth, who died at the age of two years; Levi F.
married Amanda Steele and lives in Greene township (see sketch elsewhere in
this work) ; Amanda died at the age of twenty-two years; David died at the
age of ten years; Minnie is unmarried and lives with her parents.
Religiously the family are members of the Mennonite church, and of this
society the subject is an active minister, having been ordained to this sacred
calling in 1872. He is a man of many splendid qualifications and has richly
earned the high standing which he now enjoys in the community.
JOHN C. CONRAD.
Through a long period the name of Conrad has been prominently con-
nected with the history of Wayne county. It is an untarnished name and one
that is familiar to the people of this county by reason of the honorable and
useful lives of those who have borne it. John C. Conrad, of this review, is
a gentleman whose history forms a connecting link between the pioneer past
and the modern present. He saw the country in the days when it seemed
in some respects almost on the borders of civilization, its present wonderful
development being then but in the bud. In the work of progress and devel-
opment that has since wrought such marvelous changes he has borne his part,
and today he ranks among those substantial and valued citizens of the com-
munity who laid broad and deep the foundation of the present prosperity of
the county.
Mr. Conrad was born in Baughman township, Wayne county, Ohio, on
the 3d of December, 1843. He the son of Martin and Anna (Conrad)
Conrad, who were own cousins. The subject's paternal grandfather, Jacob
Conrad, was a native of France and the father of five children, Jacob, Cath-
• arine, Peter, Martin and Christ. Martin Conrad came to this country with
his parents at the age of six years. He met with the misfortune of the loss
of one leg at the age of eighteen years. He settled on section 7, Baughman
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
township, this county, where they successfully followed farming pursuits,
and there they reared their three children, who were Fannie, the wife of C. C.
Graber, John and Lydia. Martin Conrad, who became quite wealthy, died
at the age of seventy-seven years.
John C. Conrad was reared under the parental roof and secured a prac-
tical education in the common schools of the locality. On reaching the proper
age he took up the duties of the farm and has applied himself to agricultural
pursuits continuously since. For a number of years he gave his attention to
the cultivation of the home farm, meeting with fair success, but in 1882 he
moved to his present farm, which is located in the northwest quarter of sec-
tion 2, Greene township. On this place he has a number of good and substan-
tial improvements and has maintained the place at a high standard of excel-
lence. The soil is good and Mr. Conrad reaps abundant crops as the fruitage
of his labors. He confines his efforts to no special line, but carries on a
diversified system of agriculture, combined with which he also raises large
numbers of livestock, finding this combination a profitable one. The appear-
ance of the premises indicates the owner to be a man of good judgment and
progressive ideas.
On December 8, 1870, Mr. Conrad married Catharine Ramseyer, and the
fruits of this union have been seven children, of whom five are living, namely :
Peter R. ; Amos ; Martin ; Elizabeth, the wife of J. P. Leichly ; Amanda, the
wife of E. D. Miller. The three sons were located on farms by their father's
assistance and have proved to be successful farmers. The family, except one,
are all members of the Amish Mennonite church and give every moral move-
ment their unstinted support. In politics Mr. Conrad is a Democrat and takes
a commendable interest in public affairs, though he is not in any sense a seeker
after the honors or emoluments of public office. He is public-spirited and
gives support to enterprises for the public good, being a stockholder in the
Millersburg Telephone Company and the Orrville National Bank. A man of
highest integrity and of unvarying courtesy and kindliness, he is honored by
all who know him and is regarded as one of the representative citizens of
Greene township.
LINCOLN A. YOCUM, M. D.
Health and disease are physical conditions upon which pleasure and pain,
success and failure depend. By the law of economics, the conservative and
preservative code, every individual gain increases the public gain. Upon the
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\y\L CO L’ XI V,
' ‘Mv -n< v essttdlv followed tanning pmsuits,
' ’* * - e O' i'Caai, ^ \ I o > were Fannie, the v. i i'e m ( , (T
: '• mlm C’- »urad. »hi| became quite weaklw. dwd
’ ' • -mo! nii' wr the u cental roof an* l secured a pv.w-
• ■ • • -n sc%pt T of uw- lovably. On reaching the p: of* •*
■ c-ii she taim an turn applied himself to agricuYura I
I <c a "• ‘her of years lie ga\e hi> uuvutsat *
.• :• me from. ^ ■ . u g with fa’r a;o'e<s but in i SS J he
• ai n, w 1 1 1 * 'mated in the northwest qu mtet of mm
■ . . •■h/n. Of? ^ ■ . .me lie hits «t number of good and ml mam
■ '* '■ and has . m 'm| the j?hu e at a Inch standard of excel-'
h is i< m I a * 1 d mrad r< ajw -abundant cujs as the fruitage,
i le cmb. - ebb rw to no <]*K cud line but can km on a
i s \ wteni of a -j, ooTmed wnb winch he also tames hoop*
hvest.O . • tb s eomirpation a pr* » lit a hie i me. The . • | >p\.v r-
t ■ « me1 .ef# - the • o\ nei to l.,e a man of good judgment md
• ■ ••• •• . o u ".'a! manned Catharine kamseyer, and the
■ ■ iv'h. i' of whom U\ e are living, namely:
: .me of j. I\ Leich.fv; Amanda, the
t h K*atnl on farms hv their fed erbs
. * ' ’ d farmers. The family. except etc,
i k : ■ t • c no ehtireh and give e\ eyv moral m< *' o-
mcm ’* m • ‘ mpp-n urn Mr. Conrad is a Lkmoerat and tabes
a om or ' west in p' cMirs, though he is not in any sens** a set ker
a fie” :Y •• as (,r eui h ■ ->f public office. lie is public-spirited and
gives * 'j.' - ? t<? enterin’ •’* the public good, being a stockholdt r in the
Millers’ c Telephone v . o ait'! tin ( frrville National Hank. A man «*f
highest wjNggritv and * * , .arcing r* *iines\- and kigMIuiesm he is honored hv
ah win know him a’ m regarded as true of the representative chizcmbd
( ireeue township,
LINO )LN A. VOCl’M. >!. I).
Htalw dp. -ease a e ph vocal conditions noon which pleasure ami ne.ir.
vf'o rc hire 'kpen’d IT the law of coon? >mio. the conservative- ami
pa se c -.de even mdAddual gain increases the public gain. T'p(,n the
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*
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
817
health of thexpeople as a mass is fulcrummed the prosperity of the nations;
by it every value is enhanced, every joy, every condition becomes intensive.
Life is incomplete without the possession and use of healthy organs and
faculties, for these are productive of, or give rise to, the delightful and thril-
ling sensations of existence. Health — and we might assert it as a maxim —
is essential to the accomplishment of every purpose and aim of human life.
Sickness is the stern blockade to the best intentions and most worthy and
exacted aspirations. The facts are, we are perpetually deciding upon those
conditions which either induce emotions and sensations or occasion the rever-
sionary exhibits of pleasure and pain. Prudence and our better common
judgment require us to meet the foes and obviate the dangers which threaten
us, by turning all of our philosophy, science and art into practical common
sense.
The profession of medicine is no sinecure, “no benefice without a cure
of souls”; its labors are constant, its toils unremitting, its sacrifices legion,
and its cares increasing. The physician is expected by many to confront the
grim monster, “break the jaws of death, and pluck the spoil out of his teeth.”
His ear is ever attentive to entreaty, and within his faithful breast are con-
cealed the disclosures and confidences of human suffering. Success should
stimulate to a better service, as conquest flushes and strengthens the victor. We
lavish and pile up honors on the military chieftain who has slain his thou-
sands; disease slays its tens of thousands; and is not the defeat of this ad-
versary a more glorious and brilliant achievement?
With the three liberal professions presented to them, the young men,
fresh from the college, the academy or the high schools have, if they desire to
enter, the choice of the one upon which they prefer to enter: the legal, with
its dry technicalities and classic literature; the medical, with its dignities and
elegancies of commanding authorship ; the clerical, proclaiming the warnings
of phophecy, its promises of pardon and happiness.
The subject of this biographical review saw proper at the termination
of his rudimentary course of education, to make the choice, and determination
to devote his life to the study and practice of the healing art.
Lincoln A. Yocum was born in Warrenton, in the county of Warren, state
of Missouri, May 8, 1867, and is a son of James E. Yocum, a former resi-
dent and citizen of Wayne county. His earlier labors and experiences were
upon the farm with his father, where he remained till he was twenty years of
age, having availed himself, during the preceding years, of the opportunities
and advantages of an excellent public school system, such as is furnished by
(52)
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
the great commonwealth of Missouri. He then came to Wayne county, Ohio,
making his home with, or rather becoming a member of the family of his
uncle, Dr. Joseph H. Todd, of this city. He soon thereafter registered as a
pupil of the high school, from which, after three years of close application,
industrious effort and hard, faithful study, he graduated in 1891.
After this diligent and efficient course at the high school, characterized
by the most systematic disciplinary methods with James C., only son and child
of Doctor Todd, now an eminent practicing physician and author of a recent
volume, now of Denver, Colorado, as his companion in study, vacation and in
the fields, he spent two summer terms at the Wooster University, devoting the
time not absorbed in his college work to the study of the profession upon
whose ancient and historical waters, sometimes serene, sometimes billowy, he
had resolved to unfurl a sail. He had meantime completed a full course at
Bixler’s Business College, graduating therefrom with diploma.
Having equipped himself by energetic study in the office of Doctor Todd,
aided by the counsel, tutelage and experience of this eminent gentleman and
scholar, not only in his profession, but along the lines of science, among the
surface lights and central glooms of the old earth, crowding and crowning his
shelves with the spoils of nature and art, he matriculated at the Marion-Sims
Medical College, St. Louis, Missouri, where, after the consummation of the
outlined line of work, study, experimentation, drill, etc., he graduated with the
class of 1895. He then returned to Wooster, re-entered the office of Doctor
Todd as partner, remaining with him for three years, when he assumed for
himself the responsibility of professional work, opening an office on West Lib-
erty street, nearly opposite his present office and residence, to engage in “life's
long battle with disease/’ dispense the healing balms and “lift unmoved the
glittering knife.” Not much leisure or suspensive waiting was accorded him,
as he was prepared for the exigencies of the hour and the service that came to
him. He was not like a stray joint in the boy’s puzzle that fits into no place,
but his adjustments fitted him to many and to any.
Doctor Yocum was married October 5, 1878. to Leodema A. Phillips,
of this city, a refined and educated young lady, there having been born to
this union three children, Emerson P., Miriam Louise, who died in infancy,
and Katherine R., the former nine years old and the latter two years. And
it must be noted with a feeling of pleasure, the kindliness, the loving and af-
fectionate memory of Doctor Yocum, in christening his son by the name of
Emerson — a tribute, indeed of a loyal heart, to an older brother of fine mental
qualities, professional attainments and conceded force of character, who had
studied with Doctor Todd, graduating from the same medical college as did
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
819
his brother, on his return going into practice with his preceptor for three
years. His health becoming somewhat impaired, he went to Thomasville,
Georgia, With the hope of its restoration, but his anticipations were crushed,
death ensuing, as a result of pneumonia, following an attack of typhoid
fever.
We can congratulate the Doctor in his years, that not one star has grown
dim in the cluster of his first manhood, that not one shows portents of setting
in the coming tomorrows. Fresh, ambitious, with an earnest heart, a clear
brain, moulded to his duties, without unnecessary suspicion or doubt of him-
self, his right is indisputable to have faith in himself and make pledges to
fate or fortune.
The Doctor is a quasi-Wayne county product, though born in "the State
of the Compromise” and Tom Benton, having lived here since he was twenty
years old, his father being born and raised near Millbrook in old Wayne, for
which today he entertains a most pleasant recollection, especially of Wooster,
where at one time he was clerk for the old-time popular clothing store of
John Crall & Henry. He was one of the Argonauts, the California “Forty-
niners,^ ” veined into the prose of Claggett and Bret Harte. He was married
to Adelaide Mendenhall, of Clinton township, a Methodist, and had a family
of children.
Doctor Yocum is progressive and alert in his profession, seeking at all
times to promote its interests, advance its claims to higher standards and ideals
and widen comprehensibly its spheres of usefulness. He is a member of the
Wayne County Medical Society and its president, actively participating in its
sessions and deliberations with the other medical and literary gentlemen con-
stituting its members, with the zeal of an enthusiast in medical science. He
is also a member of the Ohio State and American Medical Associations. He
was one of the five practicing physicians of Wooster who purchased the build-
ings and beautiful areas upon which are located the Wooster Hospital, on
North Market street.
Doctor Yocum is advancing toward the full vigor and strength of middle
life, earnest, energetic, buoyant, with blood and nerve thrilling for the ac-
complishment of what is best along the alignments of medical science and
stimulate the dignity and ambition of his profession to the proud plane of
constant and continual elevations. He is a gentleman eminently fitted for
the complexity of his work, composite in his qualifications as his clientele is
composite, a man of conscious sympathy, a liberal man with moral qualities
such as naturally spring from an elevated and cultivated mind, and a heart
penetrated with the love of whatsoever things are right and of good report.
He realizes that there are committed to his profession important health trusts
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
which it holds not simply in its own behalf but for the benefit of others, and
he is possessed of the noble aim to prove worthy of this generous and exacted
commission that he may enjoy present as well as retrospective satisfaction,
the noblest fruitage of professional service — the good words : “Well done,
good and faithful servant.” *
— By Ben Douglas.
EPHRAIM J. STEEL.
As a representative of one of the pioneer families of Wayne county and
as one who has here passed his entire life, it is certainly consistent that there
be entered in this work a review of the career of Ephraim J. Steel, who has
long been identified with the agricultural and stock-growing interests of the
county, having a fine estate in Greene township and being honored as one
of its representative men. He is a native of the township in which he now
maintains his home, having been bom on the old pioneer homestead on the
23d of November, 1869. He is descended from a line of pioneers, his great-
grandfather, John Steel, having come to this county from Pennsylvania in
1814 and being one of the first settlers of Wayne county, in the early develop-
ment of which he played an important part. He married Fannie Lantz and
they became the parents of three children, Jacob and two daughters. Jacob
married Sarah A. Weaver and to them were born sixteen children, named as
follows: Mary became the wife of Solomon Smith; Martha was the wife
of John Hoover; Isaac married Elizabeth Hoover; Jacob married Mary A.
Martin; Joseph, who also married; Amos married Mella Swinehart; William
married a Miss Haines; Fannie became the wife of Jacob Fike; five children
died in infancy. Isaac Steel also was the father of eleven children, all of
whom are living. He was twice married, his first wife, Elizabeth Hoover,
bearing him seven children, namely: E. J., who married Mary M. Brenne-
man; Sarah A., unmarried; Isaac married Nola Frank; Amanda, who became
the wife of L. F. Hostetler; Cyrus married Alva Kauffman; Noah married
Olive Forrer; Clara, the wife of John H. Miller. Elizabeth Steel died March
15, 1881, and subsequently Mr. Steel married Mary Wiean, and to them were
born the following children : Melvin married Blanch Hall ; Mable, Grace and
Mary, who remain unmarried. Mr. Steel died on the 18th of March, 1892.
Ephraim J. Steel was reared on the old homestead in Greene township
and secured his education in the common schools. He wrorked on the home
farm until he was twenty-one years of age, when he removed to the Levi
Trover farm, where he remained a year, and during this time was employed
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
821
by the day at farm labor. He then moved to East Union township, where he
rented a farm and operated it four years. In 1903 he moved onto the Tschantz
farm in Greene township, where he now lives. He is a wide-awake and hus-
tling farmer, and in the operation of his farm he exercises a soundness of
judgment and a careful discrimination which insures him abundant returns
for the labor bestowed. He carries on a general line of farming, raising all
the crops common to this latitude, and has achieved a distinctive success in
his vocation.
On March 7, 1897, Mr. Steel was united in the bonds of matrimony
with Mary M. Brenneman, who was born in East Union township, Wayne
county, on the 3d of December, 1873, the daughter of John R. and Eliza
(Walter) Brenneman. John R. Brenneman was born in Lancaster county,
Pennsylvania, October 26, 1825, and his wife, Eliza Walter, was bom in
Greene township, Wayne county, Ohio, in 1831. John R. Brenneman was
the son of Henry H. Brenneman, who was born in 1814 in Pennsylvania, and
he the son of Henry Brenneman, who was born in 1793. To Mr. and Mrs.
Steel have been born two children, namely: Carl W., bom February 20,
1898, and Paul, bom March 25, 1909.
In political matters Mr. Steel gives his support to the Democratic party,
and has served one year as assessor of Greene township. He is a man of
splendid qualities and is liked by all. His attention is given to general farm-
ing, and in all that he undertakes he meets with creditable success. All the
splendid improvements on his place are monuments to his enterprise, indus-
try and economy and he stands high as an enterprising and successful agri-
culturist.
JACOB S. SHIBLER.
Among the citizens of Greene township, Wayne county, Ohio, who have
built up a highly creditable reputation and have distinguished themselves by
right and honorable living, is the subject of this brief sketch. His* prominence
in the affairs of the community is conceded and his deeds speak for them-
selves. He is one of the strongest factors in this community, where there
are many men of sound sense and ripe judgment. He has shown his eminent
fitness for official honors after many years spent in the public service, and he
is willing that his record should speak for him.
Jacob S. Shibler was bom in Smithville, Ohio, on the 27th of Novem-
ber, 1849, an^ is a son of Joseph and Rosanna (Peters) Shibler, the latter
born in Pennsylvania March 26, 1828. Joseph Shibler was bom in Pennsyl-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
vania on the 24th of February, 1823, and in the same year he was brought
by his parents to Wayne county, Ohio, locating at Smithville. There he
grew to manhood, receiving a fair education in the schools of the day, which
were somewhat primitive in methods and equipment. On attaining mature
years he learned the trade of a blacksmith, which he followed during all of
his active years. To his union with Rosanna Peters there were born twelve
children, eight boys and four girls, named as follows: Jacob S., Henry G.,
F. P., Israel L., Charlotte C, J. B., Sarah W. A., Hattie Isabell, William W.,
Seneca B., Rosa V. and Samuel G.
Jacob S. Shibler was reared at Smithville and attended the common
schools, this training being supplemented by attendance at Professor Eberly’s
school at Smithville. Under his father's direction he learned the blacksmith's
trade, at which he became a proficient workman. He commanded his full
share of the public patronage along this line, and was successful financially,
so that in recent years he has been enabled to lay aside the hammer and tongs
and retire to his comfortable home in Smithville, where he now resides. His
home place comprises three acres of land and is a very comfortable and pleas-
ant home. Mr. Shibler’s career has been an honorable one and he has won
and retains a host of wrarm personal friends.
He has ever had a keen interest in the public affairs of the community
and has rendered faithful and efficient service in the official capacity of towrn-
ship clerk. He was first elected to this responsible position in 1880 and
served in all about fourteen years, being the present incumbent of the office;
also clerk of Smithville since it was incorporated in 1888, with the exception
of about two and one-half years, and clerk of the school board about sixteen
years. He has given to these offices the same careful and painstaking atten-
tion that he would give to his own private affairs, and his frequent re-election
to the offices is a marked evidence of the appreciation in which he is held
by his fellowr citizens. His political affiliation is with the Republican party,
of which he is a stanch supporter. Fraternally he is a charter member of
Smithville Lodge No. 483, Knights of Pythias, in which he has passed all
the chairs. He was the first keeper of records and seal, having served several
years in this capacity. Mrs. Shibler is a member of the Lutheran church at
Smithville and is active in its work and generous in its support.
In 1898 Mr. Shibler was united in marriage to Sadie E. Currie, who was
born August 13, 1870, and this union has been blessed in the birth of one
child, Ruie V., born November 5, 1900. Mr. Shibler is a man with broad
views and of public spirit, and one wrho takes pride in the progress of his
township and the enhancement of the public weal. He is widely knowrn and
is highly respected by all.
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
823
JOHN W. SHISLER.
Wayne county, Ohio, has been the home of John W. Shisler since his
boyhood, and he is a representative of one of the honored families of this
section of the state. He has wrought out his own success through the per-
sistent application of his energies and abdities in connection with the great
basic art of agriculture, and is known as a representative farmer of Greene-
township, where he has long occupied a leading position among his fellows.
He always stands for the best interests of the entire community and any
movement that promises to be for the benefit of his fellow citizens receives his
endorsement and support.
John W. Shisler is a native son of the old Buckeye state, having been
born in Stark county on the 8th of December, 1854. His parents were E. C.
and Catharine (Hamley) Shisler, the former of whom was a native of Lan-
caster county, Pennsylvania, whence he came to Ohio in an early day, locating
first in Stark county, near Greenville. In 1865 he came to Wayne county
and here spent the remainder of his days. He was a sturdy citizen and en-
joyed the unlimited confidence of all who knew him. He was the father of
ten children.
The subject of this sketch was eleven years old when his family came
to Wayne county, and in the schools of Wayne township he secured a prac-
tical education. He has always been a close reader and a keen observer of
men and things and is considered a very well-informed man on matters in
general. He was reared to the life of a farmer and has followed this hon-
orable occupation all the years of his active life. He is the owner of a fine
farm of one hundred and sixty acres in Greene townsh’p and also owns forty
acres in Wayne township, this county. He has acquired most of this land as
the result of his own efforts, and has brought it all up to a high state of
cultivation. His buildings are modern in style and kept in perfect repair,
and his farms are well supplied with modern machinery and all the accessories
of a modem and up-to-date farm. He grows all the crops common to this
section of the country and has met with a success commensurate with his
efforts. In addition to the cultivation of the soil. Mr. Shisler gives consid-
erable attention to the raising of livestock, in wh:ch also he has been suc-
cessful, giving special direction to Durham cattle and general purpose horses.
In 1878 Mr. Shisler married Emma E. Stutzman, who was born in
Smithville, and to this union have been bom eight children, namely: Elias;
Effie, the wife of Lawrence K. Miller; Frank S., Mabel, Edwin, Ad rain,
Grace and Ada. In religion Mr. Shisler is a member of the radical branch
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824
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
of the United Brethren church, of which he has served as a trustee. In
politics he is a Democrat and is the present assessor of Greene township, in
which office he has served several terms, rendering also efficient service as a
member of the school board of the township.
Mr. Shisler is a man of keen foresight and sagacity, and has made invest-
ments which returned to him a good profit. He is energetic, enterprising and
reliable, and therefore has won and retains the confidence of the residents of
the locality in which practically his entire life has been passed.
STEPHEN M. HENRY.
Among the worthy and honored old pioneer families of Wayne county.
Ohio, is that of Henry, members of which came here in the early days when
this section of the state gave little promise of the wonderful progress and
development which now characterizes it. They were a sturdy class, those
early frontiersmen who, disregarding personal inconvenience and sacrifice of
many kinds, bravely went to work and laid the foundations for a later and
more advanced civilization. The members of the Henry family who came to
Wayne county were coifnted among the leading and influential men of their
day and in each succeeding generation they have occupied honorable positions
among their fellow men. The history of the county would be incomplete
were there failure to make specific mention of this family.
In the old family Bible in possession of members of the family nowr living
is the following record: “Stephen Henry, born November 23, 1761, died
August 24, 1850. His wife, Mary M., bom September 3, 1757, died Sep-
tember 25, 1836.“ Stephen Henry was born in Cecil county, Maryland, and
was descended from ancestors who came from the North of Ireland and who
were second cousins of Patrick Henry, the noted Virginian patriot and states-
man. From Maryland. Stephen Henry and his family moved to Westmore-
land county, Pennsylvania, making the trip in a two-wheel ox cart. After
remaining some years in that location, they started for Ohio in the spring of
1815, locating in Wayne county near where the brewery is situated just east of
the city of W ooster. In 1831 he sold this farm and moved two miles farther
east to the location of the Henry Mills, the locality prior to that time having
been called Euclid. After some other changes in his residence, Stephen
Henry died on the mill property August 24, 1850, his wife having died some
years before. To this worthy couple were born the following children : John,
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
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born March 14, 1786, died October 21. 1843 ; Joseph, bom March 29, 1788,
died February 18, 1862; Ann (Mrs. Keslar), born July 3, 1789, died April
20, 1855; Stephen, Jr., born October 26, 1790, died February 23, 1853; John-
son. born June 8. 1792, died July 1, 1856; Mary, bom March 7, 1794, died
December 25, 1855 ; Elisha, born July 20, 1797. died in California October 28.
1862; Elizabeth (Mrs. Kelley), born April 17, 1799. died June 9, 1832.
Of these children, John was the father of Stephen M., who was bom
September 8, 1825. He was reared on the home farm and received his
education in the common schools. Because of the comparatively primitive
type of the schools of that day his education was necessarily somewhat
limited, but he was a close and discriminating reader and a keen observer
of men and things, and in his mature years he was considered a well-
informed man, being a man of prominence and marked influence in the com-
munity. After attaining the proper age he went to work in the Henry mills
and was also engaged in farming until April 1, 1854. He v/as the owner
of one hundred and seventy-four acres of land and was an enterprising and
progressive man in his operations. He was a Democrat in politics and took
an active part in local public affairs, having served six years as a member
of the board of county commissioners and thirty-three years, or a third of a
century, as justice of the peace, being elected in 1855 without any solicita-
tion on his part. In 1865 he was elected to the office of commissioner
of Wayne county, serving two terms, six years. During his incumbency
in that office he inaugurated a system of bridge building that has done
more good for the public of Wayne county than any other pre-
vious system. He was one of the board of commissioners when the present
county offices were built, and their construction is largely due to his superior
judgment and qualification as an officer. With unfaltering fidelity to duty
he, regardless of sacrifice to himself, filled every position of trust and re-
sponsibility in which he had been placed by the public. He was honest, true,
capable, broad-minded and generous. He was progressive in thought and
pronounced in the expression of his opinions, being a Democrat of the old
Jacksonian school. His death occurred on the 23d of February, 1906, and in
his passing away the community suffered a distinct loss. His was that sturdy,
dignified and stalwart character which in any community commands at once
unbounded confidence and respect.
Stephen M. Henry married Delilah Burnett, who was bom April 27,
1829, and died November 9, 1857. To them were born the following chil-
dren: Mary Jane, born December 13. 1850, died August 29, 1908, was the
wife of John Schaaf, and they had a daughter, Florence E., who is the wife
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826
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
of J. C. Patterson, of Franklin township, and the mother of five children,
those living being Mary Delilah, Stephen John, Edith and Myrtle; Stephen
John, born April 13, 1855. On March 31, 1858, Stephen M. Henry entered
into a second matrimonial alliance, this time with Catherine Burnett, who
was born November 23, 1832, on a farm adjoining her present residence.
She is a daughter of John and Eliza (Kizer) Burnett. Her father was born
April 28, 1804, in Fayette county, Pennsylvania, a son of Isaac Burnett.
The family came to Wayne county in 1808 and settled in what is now
Wooster township, where the father entered land, also entering land in
Holmes county. John Burnett received a limited education, but was a man
of energy and good judgment and attained a good repute among his fellow
men. On attaining his majority he moved onto the Franklin township farm,
which his father had entered, and there he successfully carried on agricultural
operations until his death, which occurred May 4, 1854. His wife died
October 2 2, 1871, and their remains lie in the cemetery at Moorland. They
were affiliated actively with the Methodist Episcopal church, of which Mrs.
Burnett was one of the earliest members here. He was a Republican in poli-
tics and was prominent and influential in the councils of his party. They
Were the parents of the following children: Jane, born July 22, 1831, now
deceased, was the wife of Robert Scott, of Clinton township; Catherine (Mrs.
Henry) ; Isaac, bom July 27, 1834, residing in Franklin township; Lucinda,
born February 1, 1836, became the wife of Marion Dodd, and both are now
deceased; Peter, bom November 1, 1838; Hester, born February 15, 1841,
became the wife of George Schaaf and both are deceased.
ARTY C. SAURER, D. V. S.
Among the honored professional men in Wayne county stands Dr. A. C.
Saurer. who is located in the attractive and prosperous town of Apple Creek
and who is known as one of the native sons of the county and a member of
one of the sterling pioneer families of this section of the old Buckeye state.
His ability and his profession has gained him marked prestige, while his per-
sonality is such as to have gained to him a host of warm friends in the com-
munities where he has practiced his profession.
Arty C. Saurer was born in Saltcreek township, Wayne county, Ohio,
on the 28th day of August, 1885, and is a son of E. S. and Lena (Sauvain)
Saurer. The father was for a number of years a well known teacher in the
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
827
public schools and later a successful and prosperous farmer, but is now en-
gaged as a manufacturer of tile brick at Maysville, Ohio. He is a man of
marked ability in any line to which he applies himself and is a man of splen-
did reputation in the circles in which he moves. E. S. and Lena Saurer are
the parents of four children, namely : Arty C., Lester, Zona and Lewis.
The subject of this sketch was reared on the farm in Saltcreek township
and was early initiated into the secrets of successful agriculture. He attended
the common schools and also the school at Maysville, receiving a good prac-
tical education in the common branches. He had from boyhood evinced a
fondness for animals and was also of a studious, technical turn of mind,
these elements resulting in the eventual determination on his part to take up
the practice of veterinary medicine and surgery. To this end he matriculated
in the noted Veterinary College at Toronto, Canada, in 1905, and took a full
course, graduating at that institution in the spring of 1907 with the degree
of Doctor of Veterinary Surgery. He at once entered upon the active practice
of his profession at Maysville, Ohio, but, desiring a larger field for his opera-
tions he moved, in the spring of 1909, to Apple Creek, where he is now estab-
lished. In connection with his professional work, he is also running a livery
and feed barn, in which he is meeting with gratifying success. Though young
in years, Doctor Saurer has already demonstrated in an unmistakable manner
:h?.t h 2 possesses a broad and comprehensive knowledge of his profession
and he has handled successfully a number of very difficult and apparently
hopeless cases. He is enjoying a patronage that is increasing rapidly and
he stands today one of the best known men in his profession in this part of
the county.
In politics Doctor Saurer gives his support to the Democratic ticket, in the
success of which he displays a healthy interest. Fraternally he is a member of
Apple Creek Lodge, Knights of Pythias. Quiet and unassuming in his
demeanor, Doctor Saurer has made many friends and all are united in their
high regard for one who is living an honest, industrious and upright life
in their midst.
MATTHEW BEAZELL.
This venerable and highly honored citizen of East Union township,
Wayne county, is deserving of special mention in a work of this character
owing to his long, useful and upright life and the interest he has taken in the
development of this community. He was born in Westmoreland county, Penn-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
sylvania, January 8, 1825, the son of John and Sarah (Shepler) Beazell, also
natives of the last named place. John came to Stark county, Ohio, settling
near Navarre, where he owned a good farm and where he spent the remain-
der of his life. He lived quietly and cared nothing for public display. He
was a firm believer in the Bible and the principles of the Presbyterian church,
and he took a great interest in schooling his family. He was very successful
financially, owning a well improved farm of one hundred and sixty acres:
he earned all his competence by his own efforts. He and his wife were the
parents of eleven children, namely: Matthew, Rachael, Michael F., Mary,
Harvey, William, Sarah, Harriett C., Noah H., Clara and James.
Matthew Beazell was reared on the home farm, where he remained until
he was twenty-one years of age. He attended the common schools and re-
ceived a fairly good education for those early days. He turned his attention
to teaching, which profession he followed very successfully for a period of
ten years, teaching two village schools. He later studied at Mt. Vernon,
Ohio. He was regarded as an excellent teacher and his services were in great
demand.
Mr. Beazell was married on March 24, 1859, to Hannah Cunningham,
who was born in Saltcreek township, September 11, 1834, the daughter of
James and Hannah (Finley) Cunningham, the former born in Fayette county,
Pennsylvania, in 1797. He married there and they came to Ohio and located
in Saltcreek township, southern part of Wayne county, when that section
was practically a wilderness. He was a stock raiser and farmer and in that
neighborhood he spent his entire life. He was an elder in the Presbyterian
church for many years. He and his wife were the parents of the following
children : William, Nancy, Elizabeth, Jane, Violet, Rebecca, Eb. Robert and
Hannah; two children died at the age of two and one-half years. The others
grew up on the farm in Saltcreek township. Hannah Cunningham was
reared on the farm and here she attended the district schools, receiving a good
education. After their marriage they moved to a farm in East Union town-
ship where they lived for forty-five years, or until they moved to Apple Creek
in April, 1904. They began life in a one- room log cabin in which they lived
for six years, when it was replaced by a good frame dwelling. Being hard
workers, they soon had a start and their farm of one hundred and sixty
acres made them a comfortable living and a competency • that renders their
old age free from want, giving them all the luxuries their needs require.
They started with ninety-five acres in East Union township and they now own
two hundred and forty acres of excellent land.
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To Mr. and Mrs. Beazell six children were born: James Harvey, torn
February 12, i860; Albert, born June 26, 1861, died when twenty-one years
of age; Clarissa J., bom June 5, 1864, died in August, 1864; William S., torn
August 7, 1867; Frank R., born February 22, 1869; Emma S., born Novem-
ber 16, 1876. James H. graduated from Ann Arbor University and is a
teacher; Albert graduated from the primary department of the University
of Wooster.
Mr. and Mrs. Beazell are members of the Presbyterian church. Mr.
Beazell being an elder in the same; they have long been active workers and
liberal supporters of the church. In politxs Mr. Beazell is a Republican. He
and his wife are very pleasant and they are highly esteemed by all who know
them, being generous, affable, religious and hospitable. They celebrated their
fiftieth (golden) wedding anniversary on March 24, 1909, which was a nota-
ble event to the family and many relatives and friends.
WILLIAM CASKEY.
This highly esteemed and popular citizen, who since 1906 has been the
efficient sheriff of Wayne county, is of Ohio birth and a descendant of one
of the early settlers of Wayne township, the farm on which the family
originally settled having been purchased from the government by his great-
grandfather and held in the Caskey name ever s;nce. John Caskey, the sub-
ject’s grandfather, a native of Ireland, came to America with his parents
when sixteen years old and grew to maturity on the farm in Wayne town-
ship referred to above. In due time he succeeded to the ownership of the
place and there reared his family, among his children being a son, William
Caskey, who was born and reared on the family homestead, and who after-
wards became a well-to-do farmer and representative citizen of Wayne town-
ship. He married, in young manhood, Elizabeth Criets, who was torn in the
above township, and became the father of nine children, of whom the fol-
lowing survive : Mrs. Mary Mackey, of Smithville, Wayne county ; Mrs. All-
tena McGlenen, of Creston, Ohio; Mrs. Ida Conn and Elmer E., of Wayne
township, and William M. Caskey, whose name appears at the head of this
review. The father of these children died about 1889; the mother, an aged
lady of eighty-three years, has been living for some time in the town of
Madisonburg, this state.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
William M. Caskey, whose birth occurred in Canaan township, Wayne
county, Ohio, on the 9th of April, 1862, was reared to agricultural pursuits,
received a fa;r education in the public schools and remained with his parents
until attaining his majority, when he became a tiller of the soil upon his own
responsibility. Later he operated a mill in connection with his agricultural
interests and for about twenty-s;x years ran a threshing outfit with which he
threshed much of the grain raised in his own and other parts of the county
In 1898 he was elected trustee of Wayne township and so ably and judi-
ciously were his official duties performed that three years later he was
chosen his own successor, his majorities in both elections being much larger
than those of any other candidate on the Democratic ticket.
Mr. Caskey’s honorable record as trustee, together with his active inter-
est in behalf of his party, led to his nomination in 1906 for the office of sheriff.
I11 the ensuing election he defeated his Republican competitor by one thou-
sand four hundred and seventy-seven votes, the largest majority ever given a
cand:date in the history of Wayne county, and two hundred and two more
than any other man on the ticket, a fact of which he has ever since felt
deservedly proud, as demonstrating his popularity with the people regard-
less of political ties. Taking charge of the office January 1, 1907, he ad-
dressed himself to his duties, which he has since discharged in an able and
satisfactory manner, proving a capable and popular official and a terror to
evil doers within his jurisdiction, many of whom he has arrested and brought
to the bar of justice, while not a few, fearing his determined course to reduce
crime to the minimum, have taken counsel of their better judgment by seek-
ing safer quarters in other and distant parts. In 1908 Mr. Caskey was re-
elected and his second term will expire on January 2, 1911. He has been
faithful to every trust and in his official capacity stands high in the esteem
and confidence of the people of the county and in point of efficiency and
faithfulness his administrate compares favorably with that of any of his
predecessors.
On November 17, 1892, Mr. Caskey entered the marriage relation with
Blanche Geyer, of Wayne township, his friend and companion ever since
they attended the same school in childhood and youth. Four children have
been born to this union, viz. : Ruth, aged fifteen ; William Paul, deceased ;
Florence and Raymond, aged twelve and five years, respectively. Mr. Cas-
key owns a highly improved and valuable farm in Wayne township and by
industry and thrift and good management has accumulated a sufficiency of
this world’s goods to place him in independent circumstances. He has been
a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows for eighteen years, also
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
831
belongs to the Knights of Pythias and the Fraternal Order of Eagles. He
;s a regular attendant of the Lutheran church, with which his wife holds
membership, and is a liberal contributor to its support. Generous in all the
term implies, with a large body and a heart in keeping therewith, he enjoys
the confidence of his fellow men to a marked degree and it goes without
saying that he is pre-eminently one of the most popular and highly respected
citizens of the county with which his life has been so closely identified.
WILLEY SYLVESTER OLDMAW
It was once remarked by a celebrated moralist and biographer that
“there has scarcely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative
would not have been useful.” Believing in the truth of this opinion, ex-
pressed by one of the greatest and best of men, the writer of this review
takes pleasure in presenting a few facts in the career of a gentleman who, by
industry, perseverance and close application has worked lrmself from an
humble station to a successful business man and won an honorable position
among the well-known and respected men of the city in which he resides.
Willey Sylvester Oldman was born at Homerville, Medina county, Ohio,
June 22. 1872, where he spent his childhood. Prior to his ninth year he at-
tended school at Homerville, receiving the rudiments of an education which
he has since supplemented by general reading and by coming in contact with
the world at large. At that tender age it became necessary for him to go out
and support himself, and, being a brave-hearted lad, he was soon successfully
batth’ng his way in the world of men. Working at various occupations, earn-
ing an honest dollar any way he could until he was seventeen years of age,
he went to Cleveland and, having long desired to enter the railroad world,
he sought and secured employment on the Conneaut railroad, where he re-
mained for a period as fireman and various occupations during a period of
some six years. He was also employed by the Van Cleve Glass Company, to
which he gave very faithful service.
Mr. Oldman was married on June 12, 1901, to Bede Rice, daughter of
William and Mary R’ce, of Spencer, Ohio, where Mrs. Oldman was reared
and educated, her birth having occurred at Sarinac, Michigan, on June 30.
1875. She graduated from the high school at Spencer, and taught school
in Spencer twelve years. To this union one child was born, Kenneth Rice
Oldman, November 15, 1908. Both Mr. and Mrs. Rice are affiliated with
the Methodist Episcopal church.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Soon after his marriage Mr. Oldman purchased a farm of ninety-six
acres which he worked very satisfactorily until 1909. On August 15th of
that year he came to Wooster and organized the Wooster Vacuum Cleaning
and Rug Weaving Company and he is now enjoying a very satisfactory
patronage. The vacuum cleaner which he operates is a large portable ma-
chine run by a gasoline engine, with a hose attached, fitted with sweepers.
Only the hose is taken into the house where carpets are cleaned, first-class
work being guaranteed at five cents per yard. Upholstered furniture, bed-
ding and mattresses are also cleaned by suction of air without raising a speck
of dust or removing the furniture from the room. It removes all dust and
moths from carpets and from beneath carpets and rugs without taking them
off the floor. It is a remarkable modern invention. Mr. Oldman also weaves
rugs from old ingrain and Brussels carpets, making th;s line of work a spe-
cialty and one of the principal departments of his business.
SAMUEL BROWN EASON.
It is the progressive, wide-awake man of affairs that makes the real
history of a community and his influence as a potential factor of the body
politic is difficult to estimate. The examples such men furnish of patient
purpose and steadfast integrity strongly illustrate what is in the power of
each to accomplish, and there is always a full measure of satisfaction in
adverting, even in a casual way, to their achievements in advancing the in-
terests of their fellow men and in giving strength and solidity to the institu-
tions which make so much for the prosperity of the community. Such a
man is Judge Samuel Brown Eason, of Wooster, Ohio, and as such it is
proper that a review of his career be accorded a place among the representa-
tive citizens of the city and county in which he resides.
Judge Eason represents one of the best known and most highly honored
pioneer families of Wayne county, having been born at the old Eason home-
and Susan (Brandsteter) Eason, the father born in Wooster and the mother
near Hagerstown, Maryland. The Judge’s paternal grandfather was Robert
Eason, who was among the earlier pioneers of Wayne county. He was of
English and Irish descent, his father. Samuel Eason, having emigrated from
Ireland, and his mother, Anna Marshall, from England, several years
before their marriage on Pine creek, Lycoming county, Pennsylvania, where
Robert was bom, December 10, 1795. When the latter was nine years old
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
833
his father died, and two years thereafter his mother married Edward Taylor.
Soon after this second marriage the Eason-Taylor family removed from
Lycoming to Erie county, Pennsylvania, and during their residence there
the war of 1812 was fought. In this struggle Robert Eason took part, being
in active service during a regular term of enlistment in a Pennsylvania regi-
ment then stationed with other troops at Fort Erie. He was also detained
to work as a carpenter on ships then building near the fort for service in Com-
modore Perry’s fleet. For this service, in addition to the regular pay as a
soldier, he lived to receive from the United States government a warrant for
one hundred and sixty acres of land, but his death occurred before the passage
of the act of Congress granting pensions to all who had served in the second
struggle with England for American independence.
After the war closed the family moved to Chester township, Wayne
county, Ohio, on April 14, 1816. The mother and step-mother Taylor
brought all the children with them, viz : Robert, Alexander, Mary and Anne.
The family first settled on a tract of land in the northeast quarter of sec-
tion 31, where they built a cabin and cleared land. A year after this Robert
married Beulah Sooy, daughter of Noah Sooy, who had settled two year;
previously in Chester township, having emigrated from Lafayette county,
Pennsylvania. Robert and his young wife then commenced housekeeping in
real backwoods style, near Wooster, at the Stibbs mill. Here Mr. Eason
lived for six years, when, by the aid of his good friend, Joseph Stibbs, he
purchased a small farm in the wilds of the Muddy Fork of the Mohican, to
which he moved with his wife and three children, Samuel, Joseph and
Benjamin, taking up their residence in a cabin in the woods on a quarter
section of land in Perry township, then Wayne, now Ashland county. Robert
Eason was a natural mechanic. Besides clearing land and farming, he
worked at almost every branch of various trades required by the primitive
settlements — was wagonmaker, plowmaker, weaver, blacksmith, cabinetmaker,
gunsmith, millwright, shoemaker and general utility man in the line of me-
chanics for his neighbors.
During the eight years that Robert Eason lived in Perry township he
and his neighbors joined in building the first log school house. The site
of this early “college/' the structure itself having long since disappeared, is
in Chester township, near the county line. Here Sarah Elwood, niece of
Mr. Eason, opened the first country school. In the summer of 1826 Robert
Eason built the first frame bank-barn of any magnitude in Perry township.
On January 19, 1832, he moved his family to and settled on the farm in Plain
township, later owned by his son, Hon. Benjamin Eason. Here he succeeded
(53)
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834
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
Dennis Driscoll in the business of milling, and commenced improving a new
farm, and there he lived and continued the milling business until his death,
April 14, 1854. At this place, on March 12, 1850, to this family a most sad
and terrible accident occurred, the wife of Robert Eason being crushed to
death by the machinery of the mill. The remains of husband and wife rest
side by side in the old graveyard near Millbrook.
In his boyhood days. Benjamin Eason for several years pursued the vo-
cation of teacher, varying his employment, at times, in surveying and
managing and cultivating a farm. He was not exactly a child of the wil-
derness, but wilderness conditions surrounded the rude cradle in which he
was rocked, his birth having occurred on May 5, 1822. He spent his life
in Wayne county and became one of the eminent men of his
day and generation, having devoted the latter part of his life
to the law. He taught his first school when nineteen years old and
when twenty-six was elected justice of the peace and served until
1850, when he and his brother, Alexander, who died at Placerville, Cali-
fornia, made the long, hazardous trip over the plains to California in search
of gold, being members of the “Dennison Company/' composed of
about forty Wayne county men. He returned home the following winter from
the Eldorado of the far West. In 1851 he was elected clerk of the common
pleas court, and was re-elected in 1854. He was elected to the state Senate
in 1859 on the Democratic ticket, and also served in the Senate in 1882 and
1883. He was, by appointment, treasurer of Wayne county nine months.
In 1862 he was commissioned captain of Company E, One Hundred and
Twentieth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and for some time he served
at the front in the South. In 1864 he purchased the Wayne County Democrat
and edited the same for some time. April 1, 1870, he opened an office in
Wooster with his son, Samuel B., of this review, as partner, and devoted
his time to the practice of law and continued successfully during the remaining
active years of his life.
Samuel B. Eason, the immediate subject of this biographical record,
had the privileges of the common country schools, which he attended during
the winter months and worked on the home farm the remainder of the year,
Caroline Culbertson being his first teacher in the little school house at Spring-
ville, and at an early age he evinced an inclination to study and a passion for
books. When eighteen years of age he tendered his services to the govern-
ment, and on May 27, 1862, was mustered into service, joining Company D,
Eighty-sixth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, under Capt. Andrew H.
Byers and Col. Barnabas Burns. In this regiment he served four months.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
835
his enlistment being three months, and he was discharged on September 25th
following.
Upon his return from the army, Mr. Eason registered, in the fall of
1863, at Mt. Union, Stark county, and remained in the college there one year
altogether, having attended school at home in the winter of 1863 and 1864,
returning to Mt. Union later. For one year he had charge of the college
telescope of six and three-eighths aperture. He then entered Vermillion Insti-
tute, Hayesville, Ashland county, Ohio, remaining in that institution, with
the exception of one term of teaching, until September, 1867, then, accom-
panied by Hon. John K. Cowen, late president of the Baltimore & Ohio Rail-
road Company, as roommate, he entered the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor, from which he was graduated in the spring of 1869, having
completed the course in law. Hon. John W. Kern, of Indianapolis, was his
class-mate at Ann Arbor. In the winter of 1867-8 he was elected one of
five to take part in the public exercises of the Webster, the most prominent
literary society of the law department, and the next day after the exercises
they were entertained at dinner by Judge and Mrs. Thomas W. Cooley, and
he carries the incident in memory as one of the most pleasant of school
days. The next winter he was president of the Webster.
Mr. Eason located at Columbia City, Indiana, but in 1870 he returned
to Wooster, Ohio, and formed a partnership with his father, practicing thus
for two years. Later his brother, Benjamin, joined the firm of B., S. B.
& B. F. Eason, which continued until 1885, when Samuel B. began practicing
alone, having by this time won an enviable reputation at the local bar.
In 1897 Samuel B. Eason was elected judge of the common pleas court,
in which he made a splendid record and was re-elected to the same responsi-
ble position in 1902, and by legislative enactment the term was lengthened
to six years, and he served until January 1, 1909, then resumed the practice
of law. The Taggart divorce case and the Dickinson murder trial were among
the noted cases that came before him as judge.
Judge Eason was married on May 7, 1885, to Anna Hindman, a lady of
education and refinement, the daughter of John and Nancy (Phillips) Hind-
man. She was bom at Apple Creek, this county, and at the time of her
marriage lived at Wooster. This union has been without issue.
The Judge’s home, at No. 117 West Liberty street, is one of hospitality
and good cheer, cozy and a favorite mecca for the many friends of himself
and wife. The business of the Judge is exclusively the practice of law, and
he is also the owner of a valuable and attractive farm of two hundred and
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836
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
forty -five acres in Franklin township, which he operates. He has placed
many valuable improvements on it, including forty-six thousand feet of drain
tile, erected substantial buildings, etc.
Politically, Judge Eason is a Democrat and as a speaker and advisor
during campaigns his services are most valuable, the success of the ticket
in a number of campaigns being largely attributable to his wise counsel and
judicious leadership.
As a lawyer Judge Eason busies himself with those things in which
success depends upon the symmetrical judgment and practical grasp that
come from reading and reflection. These characteristics were observed while
on the bench, his fidelity to duty there and his faithful discharge of the same
winning the admiration of all concerned, irrespective of party alignment.
He is a man of intense energy and application. He goes into court with
his case completely in hand. The labor of preparation is not considered. He
has a keen perception of the varying phases of human nature which charac-
terize his professional career. In counsel he is inquisitive, exacting and ex-
haustive, wanting to know the truth and the facts. As an advocate he is
earnest, resolute and persuasive, and is, withal, one of Wayne county's ener-
getic, public spirited citizens, richly deserving the high esteem in which he
is held by all classes.
Judge Eason is the owner of a fine refracting telescope of nine inches
clear aperture, made for him in 1882 by the celebrated firm of Alvan Clark
& Sons, and of which Alvan Clark. Sr., the founder of the house, in an
autograph letter to him, states that the object glass was made with his own
hands and that it is one of his best. This he uses for occasional recreation,
and with it in 1882 he obtained a view of the atmosphere of Venus, which
would not be visible again for one hundred and twenty years, or until the
next transit, and many other interesting and beautiful views of the planets
and stars have been gained by him through this splendid instrument.
CYRUS A. RIEDER.
As long as history endures will the American nation acknowledge its
indebtedness to the heroes who, between 1861 and 1865, fought for the pres-
ervation of the Union and the honor of the starry banner which has never
been trailed in the dust of defeat in a single polemic conflict in which the
country has been engaged. Among those whose military records, as valiant
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
837
soldiers of the war of the Rebellion, reflect lasting honor upon them is the
subject of this sketch, who is now living a retired life in the pleasant little
town of Apple Creek and who is known as one of the sterling citizens of
Wayne county, where for a number of years he was successfully engaged
in professional pursuits.
Cyrus A. Rieder was born at Maysville, Saltcreek township, Wayne
county, Ohio, on the 30th day of January, 1844, and is a son of Daniel, Jr.,
and Sarah A. (Mowrey) Rieder. Daniel Rieder was brought to Wayne
county by his parents in 1813, when he was but a boy, and here he adopted
the pursuit of farming, which he followed during the remainder of his active
l;fe. He was prospered, and eventually became the owner of two hundred
acres of good land. Unfortunately, however,, he became surety on a bond,
which, becoming forfeited, ruined him financially. He married Sarah A.
Mowrey and they became the parents of sixteen children, ten of whom grew
to mature years.
The subject was reared on the parental farmstead, on which he worked
until he was seventeen years old. At that time the war had broken out in
the Southland and, feeling the patriotic impulse, he volunteered for service
in the defense of h;s country and joined Company C, Forty-first Regiment
Ohio Volunteer Infantry, the date of his enlistment having been August 8,
1862. He remained with this command, participating in a number of the
bloodiest battles of that great conflict, including those of Stone River, Chick-
amauga and Missionary Ridge. In the last named engagement Mr. Rieder
received a terrible wound in the right leg, from the results of which he has
had to undergo two amputations. He was discharged in 1864, and, returning
to his Wayne county home, he at once took the first steps towards securing
a good education. He attended first the school at Fredericksburg, and then
went to Professor Eberley’s school at Smithville. He then engaged in teach-
ing school, in which he was successful and which he continued for nine years.
He had determined to take up the profession of the law and to this end during
the past several years he had put in all his spare time in the study of Black-
stone, Kent and the other great legal authorities. Eventually he took the ex-
aminations at Wooster and was properly admitted to the bar of Wayne county.
He located at Wooster and entered actively into the practice of his profession
and was soon numbered among the leading members of the bar. He was
elected city attorney of Wooster, in which position he served four years, and
also served two terms as county attorney and prosecuting attorney. In all
these positions he acquitted himself in a manner which won for him an en-
viable reputation among his professional brethren. He went to Kansas and
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838
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
located at Anthony, where he remained for eight years, during which time
he engaged in the practice of the law. While there he served four years as
postmaster, receiving his appointment under President Cleveland’s first ad-
ministration. At the end of the period noted Mr. Rieder returned to his
old home in Wooster and resumed the practice of his profession, in which
he continued until 1900, then went to St. Regis Falls, New York, and stayed
eight years, and came back and retired at Apple Creek, where he is now
living. In recognition of his faithful sendee during the Civil war, and as
a partial recompense for the physical injury from which he suffered, the
subject now receives a liberal pension from the government which he helped
to preserve and perpetuate. In his professional life Mr. Rieder was recog-
nized as a man of unusual attainments and occupied a high position in the
estimation of those who knew of him and his work. He is a good speaker,
a close student and an indefatigable worker, — elements which contribute to
a large measure to the success of any lawyer. In private life he is a man
whom it is a pleasure to know. Genial in manner, a splendid conversation-
alist, faithful in his friendships and of unimpeachable personal character,
he is eminently deserving of the unstinted confidence and respect which are
accorded him throughout the community, and he is particularly deserving of
representation in a work of this character.
PETER WELTY.
A representative of one of the old and honored families of Wayne county,
which since pioneer days has been prominently connected with the develop-
ment and substantial progress of this section of the state, Mr. Welty is worth-
ily sustaining the high reputation of the family, through his active and useful
life, prominence in connection with the agricultural industries of this favored
section of the Buckeye state and his influential position as one of the county's
extensive landholders. There is utmost compatibility in here entering a brief
review of his career, and aside from being a valuable and perpetual record,
the article will be read with interest by the many friends of himself and
family.
Peter Welty was born on the farm on which he now resides in section 5,
Paint township, Wayne county. Olr’o. on February 17, 1839. He is a son of
John and Barbara (Lukenbill) Welty. John Welty was a native of canton
Berne. Switzerland, and came to the United States in his young manhood un-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
839
accompanied. He went first to Virginia, where he remained for a time, and
then came to Ohio, settling in Wayne county. He is supposed to have been
married :n Holmes county, for he farmed for a while near Minesburg, that
county. Subsequently he came to Wayne county and bought the land where
the subject now lives. He was in politics a strong Democrat, but declined to
accept any public office. Besides being a successful farmer, he was also a
good mechanic, being proficient in blacksmithing and carpenter work. He was
also the owner of land in Putnam county, this state, and was in all his affairs
a prosperous man. He was a member of the Mennonite church and lived a
life consistent with his professions. After coming to America, Mr. Welty
was married to Barbara Lukenbill, who settled in Holmes county with her
parents when she was quite young. To Peter and Barbara Welty were born
nine children, as follows : Chris C., Catherine, Barbara, Mary, Anna, Peter,
Magdalene, Fannie and John, the latter dying in infancy.
Peter Welty remained under the parental roof during his youth and
received a fair education in the district schools of the neighborhood. He
early applied himself to the labors of the farm and gave his undivided atten-
tion to the work, in which he has continued during all his active days. He
has followed general farming and has been progressive in his methods, keep-
ing in close touch with the most advanced ideas relating to the science of agri-
culture. He has never been tempted to forsake the great basic art, which is
the foundation and strength of the commercial life of the nation, realizing
that the successful husbandman is the most independent and carefree man
in the country. Mr. Welty owns a fine farm and has given intelligent direc-
tion to every detail of the work thereon. His buildings are commodious and
well arranged, his machinery is thoroughly up-to-date, the fences well kept
and everything about the place shows the owner to be a man thoroughly prac-
tical in his ideas and methods. In connection with the tilling of the soil
he also gives some attention to the breeding and raising of livestock, in
which also he has been prospered. Now in the golden sunset years of his life
he has laid aside much of the actual manual labor of the farm, but his interest
in the work is unflagging and he is as alert and keen in his interest in passing
events as in his prime.
Politically, Mr. Welty has always voted the Democratic ticket, but has
never sought nor held publ'c office of any nature, being content to occupy
the rank of a private citizen, though at all times he has been found an earnest
supporter of all worthy movements for the general good. He and his wife
are members of the Mennonite church, to which they give an earnest support.
In 1861 Mr. Welty was united in marriage to Anna Gerber, who was
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840
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
born in May, 1839, in Sugar Creek township, this county, the daughter of
Woolerick Gerber. To the subject and his wife have been born eight chil-
dren, namely: Benjamin, Barbara (deceased), John, William, Rosa, Daniel.
Sarah and Reuben.
Mr. Welty has through a long course of years retained the unqualified
esteem of the community. He has consistently devoted his time and attention
to his business interests, through which he has gained a gratifying and well-
merited success. Industry, energy and progressive spirit have ever been
dominating characteristics in his makeup and through these forces he has
attained a distinctive degree of prosperity and is numbered among the repre-
sentative agriculturists of the county.
J. H. TODD. M. D.
The ancestors of Dr. Joe H. Todd on his paternal side were Scotch-
Irish and Welsh; on the maternal, they were Holland Dutch and Welsh,
with a mingling of what Emerson calls “compact old English blood.*' His
mother was a direct descendant of Peter Yokom, who immigrated to America
from Holland in 1693 and settled at Sweedsford, near Philadelphia, Penn-
sylvania. His oldest son, John, married Elizabeth DeHaven, a Welsh Quak-
eress, and died or was killed in the Revolution February 10, 1777. About
this time, at a family reunion, the name Yokom was changed to Yocum. His
son, also named John, was born at Sweedsford February 14, 1757, and mar-
ried Mary Evans, of Welsh-English blood, at Chester, Pennsylvania. He
migrated to York county, Pennsylvania, where he established Yocumtown,
on the Susquehanna, and removed to W ayne county, Ohio, in 1828. He was
a Revolutionary soldier and Doctor Todd’s great-grandfather. His son,
Elijah, was the Doctor's grandfather and was a local Methodist preacher
and a builder of carding machines and mills. He was married to Catherine
Wagoner, a “Pennsylvania-Dutch” girl, at Yocumtown, and here was born
the Doctor’s mother, Caroline Matilda Yocum, in 1813. Doctor Todd’s
paternal great-grandfather, Capt. James Todd, was born in county Antrim,
north Ireland, of Protestant parents, in 1690, and came to America with a
Welsh wife about 1740 and located at Baltimore, Maryland. He had the
mariner’s thirst for the sea, the skill and education of the mechanic and
sailor in building and sailing his craft. He was a sea captain and became
the owner of vessels plying between his home city and the Bermudas. Ba-
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
841
hamas and Cuba, as well as an importer of Arabian horses. But. like many
who go out on the sea in ships, he met with disaster, and the requiem of his
hopes was chanted in tempest and storm. His two ships went down off Hat-
teras. The losses were heavy, his spirit broken, and he retired to a small
farm in York county, Pennsylvania, where his family had a summer home
in his absence. Here the Doctor's grandfather, James Todd, was born
in 1750, who as a boy frequently went on voyages with his father, for he,
too, loved the sea; but when disaster destroyed their wealth, he was appren-
ticed to a saddler in York. He learned the trade, but later was a teacher in
a Quaker school, where he married a Quaker maiden and returned to the
old farm. He was appointed justice of the peace by Governor Trimble and
made captain of militia. The Doctor’s father, James Todd, was born on
this farm in 1796 (the name James had been given to the eldest son for
many generations). After the death of his father, in 1828, he came to Ohio
and located in Wayne county, dealing in land and horses. He was married
in 1836 to Caroline Matilda M unhall, a widow, whose maiden name was
Yocum. To them two children were born, Joe H. and Lunette Yocum, the
former of which is the subject of this sketch.
A number of Doctor Todd's earlier years were spent upon his father’s
farm near Millbrook, where he attended the old conventional, but now tradi-
tional, country school, subsequently registering as a student at Vermilion
Institute, Hayesville, Ohio, under the presidency of Rev. Sanders Diefendorf,
then one of the foremost academic educators of Ohio. From here he went
to Fredericksburg Academy. On the completion of his disciplinary course
of institutional drill and methods in 1861, he commenced the study of
medicine. After the battle of Gettysburg, in response to the national gov-
ernment call for medical aid, although yet a student, he hastened to the
scene of that desperate struggle, which supplied him extraordinary opportuni-
ties in the practical part of surgery, both as an operator and assistant in
those crucial tests to the unfortunate which resulted from the iron game
of war. Here and at Chambersburgh and Harrisburg he remained during
the summer, when he proceeded to Bellevue Hospital, New York, remaining
there during the winter of 1863-64. Here were afforded him special les-
sons in surgery by Professor Smith of Bellevue, and private instruction from
Austin Flint, Sr., directly in the branches of percussion and auscultation of
the lungs, from whom came a strong and merited endorsement of his skill
and accomplishments. In 1864 he was a private student of Frank Hamilton.
In 1865 he received his diploma and commenced practice with a clientage
from the beginning that prognosticated his future success. In 1869 he was
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842
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
a delegate to the National Medical Society at New Orleans, being commis-
sioned by the Medical Society of Wayne County. To further gratify his
aspiration to attain the highest possible skill and excellence in the various
departments of his profession, he returned to New York, placing himself
under the special care of Austin Flint, Jr., as second assistant in the depart-
ment of physiology, receiving private instruction in surgery from Professor
Hamilton and also from Delafield, in microscopy. In 1870 he again visited
New York, where he was for a period assistant to Austin Flint, Jr., in
physiology laboratory.
In 1876 Doctor Tood purchased a home in Wooster and permanently
located there. He is a member of the American Public Health Association,
and has been since 1892. He was a delegate to the International Medical
Congress at Washington. D. C, in 1885, and again to Berlin, Germany,
in 1890, visiting the hospitals of Europe in the interests of his profession.
He assisted in founding the Ohio Archaeology and Historical Society at
Columbus, Ohio, in 1881, and was one of its earliest members. He is a
member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, chosen
in 1892. He was present at the second meeting of the Ohio Academy of
Science after its organization, was elected a member and is uniform in his
attendance of its meetings, at Columbus, Ohio, where it was established
in 1892. Its first president was Edward W. Claypool. It is composed of
about two hundred members. He has read three papers before the academy
on the preglacial drainage of Wayne and associated counties.
The investigations and researches that Doctor Todd has made in his
various fields of scientific thought have been most valuable contributions
and have served a distinctive purpose with other scientists and specialists
of the institutions of which he is a member, in establishing and sustaining
organized societies and institutes for original research.
In the processes along these lines of scientific and antiquarian research
there seem to be three stages of development. In the first there comes a
period of discovery, during which the region is traversed by traveling special-
ists, either as independent investigators with a laudable and instinctive love
for their work, anticipating no special reward for their labors, only so
far as thev can enlighten mankind, stimulate inquiry into the mysteries of
the arcanum of nature and add some new chapters to the folios of science,
or by such persons attached to expeditions sent out by government or by
scientific institutions. In this way the general nature of the anthropologic,
ethnologic, archaelogic and biologic conditions are made known to science,
and in most cases much data and many hitherto unknown facts, truths and
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
843
results are attained and described. In the second stage the field is occupied
by local residents, collectors, persons who are able to devote a portion of
their time to observation and research and to the preservation of the speci-
mens that they find, without the opportunities and accessories of libraries and
other facilities for original research. Such persons seldom publish the re-
sults of their labors and accumulations, but send their treasure to specialists,
more favorably situated, who know the discoveries of their correspondents.
In the third stage comes the development of local research, by resident anti-
quarians and scientists, who spend years of patient toil, extracted from busi-
ness or professional life, in studying the conditions that surround them,
traversing home and adjacent districts, and by publishing the results of
their exploitations gradually introduce to the light a rich profusion of scien-
tific data. As the resident specialists increase in number they specialize by
degrees, so that in time all phases of the subject receive proper attention.
The culmination of these conditions is the founding of great establishments
for original research.
The labors of Doctor Todd have proven to be substantial auxiliaries
in these directions, and his observations and researches from a local stand-
point have found expression in valuable publications and aided in accom-
plishing the organization, permanence and security of the Academy of Science,
at Columbus, Ohio. Independent of his studies and investigations and
writings in testimony of his persistence, energy and enterprise, he has accu-
mulated a cabinet of thirty thousand specimens, the largest private collection
in Ohio, twenty thousand of which are historic and absolutely perfect, the
remaining ten thousand being equally historic but partly incomplete. He
lately presented five thousand to the Wooster City Library.
Doctor Todd is advanced in years to beyond middle life, is of medium
height, with strong, wiry nerves, has black hair, faintly touched by the sil-
very spray of years, with darting, dark, perceiving eyes, a clean, classic face,
in which are mirrored his thoughts, feelings and emotions, the silent languages
of the soul and heart as they are radiated from intellectual centers of acute
and deep intensity. His faculties are in their zenith and in the highest de-
gree capable of action, work and achievement, his physical forces ever ready
to sustain his best promotive mental enterprise. He possesses the genius of
adaptation to the subject in hand, and practices surgery on Time by cut-
ting it into divisions and sub-divisions for the better and more systematic
accomplishment of his professional, historic and scientific designs. Circum-
stances, however iron-clad, are seldom permitted to interfere with his dis-
tribution of work, for which he is in a state of constant preparation and
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844
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
adjustment to it. All his bases and foundations are well and strongly laid.
This has been emphasized from the beginning of his professional career.
In the battle with disease he must first reconnoiter the field and locate the
enemy, bringing tact, judgment, reason and strategy to his assistance before
assaulting the citadel. Nor does he rely on tactics of the books or the
speculations of the old teachers, writers and theorists or depend upon a set
of stereotyped methods to attain conclusions or achieve results. The entire
human cosmos must be studied, its springs and action, temperament and con-
stitutional peculiarities, the vibrations and relations of every chord of the
poetic thousand on the human harp. He must seek and know, “For knowl-
edge is of things we see.” Nothing is taken for granted, nothing suspended
in uncertainty, refusing to doubt when there is a rational possibility of being
sure. He has, therefore, found it necessary to implicitly trust himself,
others only so far as he may not be damaged in their disappointment.
In his divisions of study, experiments, and investigations and travel, '
Doctor Todd finds an inspiriting life; he finds it in the forests and fields,
among the pebbles and stones, the grasses and grains, the vines and orchards
of his farm, in his beautiful home, with its stabilities of brick and stone, and
its multiform tenantry of flowers and trees, overlooking the beautiful valley,
whose preglacial history he has revealed to geologic science, and the irregular,
undulating and hilly landscapes beyond with unraveled signs and legends,
costumed in summer in delightful colors, lifting a robe of purity to the dawn
and bursting into primal beauty at the touch of the sinking sun. In the
enjoyment of this selected life an unusual importance is attached to the
interest with which he invests it by word or conversation. He talks fluently
on the subject-matter under consideration, with a familiarity with it that
indicate how clearly he comprehends it; talks readily and quick and to the
point, with singular accuracy and conciseness and invariably with an ob-
jective. In his written productions is found remarkable perspicacity, strength
and compactness of statements, an orderly and logical marshalling of ideals,
in which is employed vigorous, but plain, pure English words, having but
little use for superlatives, yet recognizing the fact that they are frequently
decorations, but neither strengthen nor vitalize expression. There is a strict
form and technical directness and transparency of thought and elucidation
in all emanations from his pen. His habit is to think intently and well of his
subject, hold it with a firm mental sub-maxillary grip, and when the time
comes he rapidly unreels the finished fabric from his mind.
As a man Doctor Todd is substantial and intrinsic in his personality, a
self-adjusting, independent, veritable entity, without a proxy, always stand-
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ing and answering for himself, maintains the essentials of proper equipoise
and a lofty spirit, is benevolent, sympathetic, and humorous, all of which
qualities pre-eminently characterize him. If the impulsiveness of some
of the Celtic grit that is him crosses his orbit, the steadier and safer equilib-
riums of his Dutch maternal blood act as a repellant and counter-force,
when the shadow on the disc suddenly disappears. His student hours are
tense and dense amid the silences of inquisitive and contemplative thought.
To such minds relief to reflection is best assured by further reflection. What
he reads, sees, hears and thinks, serves his premises; with these he cares,
first, to improve himself. He deeply enjoys both ancient and modem litera-
ture, the old poets and masters, the classic authors, the heralds and voices
of antiquity, kneels at the shrines of the great artists and the fame-winners
in sculpture and painting and architecture, participates in the acclamations
of the triumphs of art and “the blaze of every science.” For all of these and
for maps and charts and models “and dusty tomes crowded with heavy but
profound philosophies and researches,” he possesses an exalted if not spirit-
ualized appreciation. He enjoys, not alone, the distinguished merit and
scholasticism of the literature of his profession, but the learning of men of
learning, the best literary productions, whether those of Tacitus or Macaulay,
and Chaucer or Tennyson — those composing and embodying the highest
results of knowledge and fancy, preserved and transmitted by the old or
later authors. He does not incline to a literature which exclusively regards
the personal, the romantic and beautiful, as the cardinal objects of thought
and expression, but rather one that combines those characteristics with defi-
nite and accurate description, exact analysis, and the bringing together of
true cause and effect as the chief end.
A scholar himself, with the training of the schools and familiar with
college curriculums and the courses of study, the Doctor cherished the as-
sumptions of his own line of study, and with due regard to preordained
thinkers he has chiseled lines which are modest historical testimonies. And
here he rests, as is his right. Among the possibilities of those existing are
his incredulity in methods of education in this or any period of spasmic
culture. His convictions of conscience are not absolutely in colleges and
universities — men factories, in which you can make a man a real, live illum-
inating genius out of the raw masticated material of creation. There must
be a touch of the Master in it ; the spirit of the Designer behind it. In a Greek
quarry, like ancient Oxford, there is a major portion who would make better
operators as carpet-weavers in the mills of Wilton or steel grinders in Shef-
field.
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Significally characteristic of the Doctor is his diligence in circumscrib-
ing himself to the circle of his own affairs, whether in the administrations of
his profession, the fascinating seclusion of his reliquaries or in perigrinations
through the forests and fields or the slenderly wooded acres of the streams,
challenging the outposts of landscapes for their buried or unburied, or even
their semi-articulate tones of time, their resonant, choiceful antiquarian le-
gends and secrets.
If Dr. Todd were objectless he would be a brilliant, if apparently fading,
taper, but never invisible in the toneless halls of sleep. Not true is this.
There is constantly an object impelling him, and such is his self-balance that
he floats steadily on, whether on smooth or troubled currents, where and when
he can afford to wait, accounting expectations as no punishment and willing
to abide, if necessary, the adjournment of his hopes until the next day. If
he has formality, it is that of his style and greeting, and upon meeting him
his social and mental circumferences are at once visible. If there be a state-
liness and a degree of selfhood, they are appurtenances belonging to him,
but this is not sutre, or unbending, but native qualities which adhere and
dwell in so metropolitan and composite a nature.
There are times when solitude, the compressed silences of the ages,
break the limit and the eternal mandate of the world, when the thinker must
retire and in the sweet martyrdom of seclusion speak to himself and address
himself in the untold, unwritten language of the human soul, and in this sense,
with what the eye can see in sight, or the mind can compass, more specially
in looking back, he seeks his days and periods of tranquil quietness in seclu-
sion, in his quaint libraries, his museum, among his geologic fossils, his In-
dian quarries and prehistoric repositories, his aggregated things of antiquity
and old atmosphere. Here he can conceal himself to be guessed at by those
who do not know\ to be understood by those who understand, to see and
work unseen and when he emerges to the light again to be known by his
vitalizations and actions that his retirement was not affection. From the
effect of his exact professional habits he is discriminate and technical in
place, time and order and is self- regulated to a degree which sometimes
excites a suggestion, but this is essentially associated with the conscientious-
ness which forms a conspicuous future of his character. He would be re-
garded as a man well born, well derived, well disciplined and well finished,
the strongest representative of his own personality, the sentinel of each of
his own particular wards, a rampart to himself, testifying to the relations
which he finds in life. He aims, first, to do justice to himself: this done, he
can dismiss all menace of opposition or lack of appreciation or superstition.
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He who keeps the door of a mine, whether of galena, mercury, plumbago,
or aluminum, will soon know that the people want to see him, as real men
always prefer to see and know real men.
The possession of the instinct of a man of historic and scientific ven-
tures implies the boldness to do and accomplish ; it carries in it the symptoms
of determination and courage, for the culminations of all battles, whether
fought in the interest of science or themselves, are pivoted on courage. The
fibers and sinews of the scholar and thinker then reaches the stage and fills
the proscenium. It is superbly gallant to be brave at cannon points, but
better to be brave when better issues are joined. With Doctor Todd, he
would sooner be the defendant than the challenger, but he in his inmost heart
detests cowardice. If, however, he resolves to do or act, he would, with the
mariner s instinct of his ancestry, plunge into the ships that go down into
the sea, and in the delicious peril of death hammer at the doors that had
never been opened. Even then, he would violate his attachments to his
curios, and experience an ambiguous sound in the tender, holy and potential
celestialities of a divinely Miltonic scene.
Of his curios! But he is not English enough to swing in hammocks,
from the boughs of the Upas tree, or put the blood of a martyr in an elembic,
or to saw a hole in the head of the“Winking Virgin” to know why she winks,
but, if he won a Croesus or was the successor to the earldom of Arundel,
he would beg the secrets of nature and, like Sir George, enrich the universi-
ties of the world with his gifts.
— By Ben Douglas.
JOSEPH PERILSTEIN.
The record of Joseph Perilstein is that of a man who, by his own un-
aided efforts, has worked his way from a modest beginning to a position of
influence and prosperity. His life has been one of unceasing industry and
perseverance, and the systematic and honorable methods he has followed have
won him the unbounded confidence of his fellow citizens. Joseph Perilstein,
a well-known merchant of Orrville, is an American by adoption only, but he
has always been loyal to our institutions since his coming here. He was
born in Austria-Hungary in 1873, the son of Abraham and Molly Perilstein,
both of whom are still living in the old country.
Young Joseph in his boyhood assisted his father about the home place
and dreamed of the great republic across the Atlantic of which he had been
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told so much, and, when eighteen years of age, he got enough money together
to come to America. He landed in New York, but later came on to Cleve-
land. He was penniless, but, being ambitious and possessing many of the
qualities that always make for success, he soon found employment in selling
goods to individual families. He could not speak English, but study and ob-
servation soon acquired our language. He was on the road for four and
one-half years. Then in 1896 he came to Orrville, Ohio, and engaged in the
dry goods business and, being successful from the first, he has been here ever
since, having built up an excellent trade with the town and surrounding
country. He had but little capital when he came here, but he has been very
successful and is now carrying a large stock of merchandise, carefully se-
lected and up to date, and his prices are always right, according to many of
his customers, who come from all parts of the county to deal. At first his
store was very small, but now it requires three large rooms to accommodate
his large stocks, occupying the first, second and third floors of a substantial
building in the best business part of the city. He carries a full line of dry
goods, cloaks, carpets, rugs and lace curtains, and his store is always a busy
place. He requires a number of clerks and other employes to assist in car-
rying on his rapidly growing business. Here customers always get courteous
consideration and a square deal. In other words, he conducts “The Growing
Store of Wayne County.”
Mr. Perilstein was married in 1889 to Edith Warner, a native of Aus-
tria, but she came to America when young, having spent her early girlhood
in Vienna. Their marriage occurred in New York. They have no children.
Mr. Perilstein is a stockholder in the Orrville National Bank and he also
has valuable real estate holdings. He has a beautiful home and is one of
the leading citizens of Orrville. Fraternally he belongs to the Independent
Order of Odd Fellows. He is an obliging, genteel, progressive business man,
who has won a reputation for both industry and fair dealing.
JAMES M. WARD.
One of the well known and influential citizens of Congress township,
Wayne county, Ohio, is James M. Ward, who for a number of years has
resided here and successfully conducted one of the best farms in the town-
ship. He has always been actively interested in everything which tended to
promote the development of this region, and has been confidently counted
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upon at all times to endorse progressive measures and to uphold the law,
right and justice. Mr. Ward was born in the township of Canaan, this
county, his natal day having been the 25th of December, 1852. His father
was John W. Ward, who was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1821, and
who married Mary Magdeline Ritter, who was born in Chester township,
this county, in 1829. John W. Ward was a prominent and successful farmer
near Burbank, this county, and died in 1898. In politics he was a Democrat
and took a live interest in public affairs. He and his family were active
members of the United Brethren church. To him and his wife were born
six children, a remarkable feature in connection therewith being the fact that
they included three pairs of twins. They are mentioned as follows: John
and James, the former being deceased, and the latter being the subject of this
sketch ; Christina and Lucy, the former the wife of Frank Myers, of Bur-
bank, and the latter the wife of Daniel Hartman, of Greene county, Ohio;
John Leander and Mary Esther, the former living in this state, and the latter
being a nurse in California. A further notable fact regarding the five sur-
viving children is that their aggregate weight is over half a ton. The
subject's paternal grandfather, Robert Ward, was a native of Baltimore,
Maryland, and was a stone-mason by trade. He came from Maryland to
Ohio in 1836, locating in Canaan township. The maternal grandfather
was Jacob Ritter, native of Pennsylvania who came to Ohio sometime
before the twenties and settled in Chester township, Wayne county, where
he operated the large farm now owned by John Raudebaugh.
James M. Ward secured his preliminary education in the common school
near his home, after which he took the literary course at Lodi Academy,
He was then engaged for eight winters in teaching school, in which he
was eminently successful. He had decided to make the practice of medicine
his life work and to this end his leisure hours during this period were
spent in the study of medicine and under the direction of Dr. C. J. Warner,
of Congress. By dint of rigid economy, the subject managed to save five
hundred dollars and with this he matriculated in the Cincinnati College of
Medicine and Surgery. He completed his technical studies in the medical
department of Wooster University, graduating in 1878 with the degree of
Doctor of Medicine. During the following two years he was engaged in
the practice with Dr. Warner, his former tutor, and at the end of that
period he opened an office alone in that town. He also owned and operated
a drug store, and was highly successful in both professional and commercial
lines. During the following five years he was very busily engaged ami
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was highly gratified with his success. In 1885 his father-in-law died, and
it became necessary for him to supervise the large Van Sweringen farm in
Congress township. I11 order to properly do this, the Doctor found it nec-
essary to give up his practice, which he did and moved onto the farm. He
has since continued to manage this property and has been equally as suc-
cessful in this line as he formerly was in his profession. He and his wife
together own about two hundred and fifty acres of land in Wayne county
and they have been greatly prospered in the operation of this land. The
Doctor is progressive in his methods and keeps in close touch with the
most advanced methods of agriculture. He keeps the place up to the highest
standard of excellence and the appearance of the place indicates the owner
to be a man of good taste and sound judgment.
In politics the subject gives an enthusiastic support to the Republican
party, but is not in any sense a seeker for public office. He gives his unre-
served support to every measure that promises to benefit the community
in any way.
On the 31st of October, 1878, Mr. Ward wedded Martha H. Van
Sweringen, who was born in Congress township, this county, October 31,
i860. Her father was Thomas Van Sweringen, a prominent farmer of
that township. Her mother was a member of the Miller family, being Mary
A. Miller. To this union have been born two children, namely: Roy M..
born April 30, 1890, and Georgia May, born September 15, 1880, and who
is now the wife of Hugh Johnson, a prominent farmer of this county. So-
cially, Mr. Ward is a member of the Junior Order of United American Me-
chanics. Mr. Ward is one of the leading citizens of his township and is
well worthy of the regard in which he is universally held. Mrs. Ward is a
member of the Presbyterian church at Congress.
JOHN CRAMER.
The office of biography is not to give voice to a man’s modest estimate
of himself and his accomplishments, but rather to leave upon the record the
verdict establishing his character by the consensus of opinion on the part
of his neighbors and fellow citizens. In touching upon the life history of the
subject of this sketch the writer aims to avoid fulsome encomium and extrav-
agant praise, yet he desires to hold up for consideration those facts which
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have shown the distinction of a true, useful and honorable life — a life char-
acterized by perseverance, energy, broad charity and well-defined purpose.
To do this will be but to reiterate the dictum pronounced upon the man by
the people who have known him long and well.
John Cramer, who is numbered among the enterprising and successful
agriculturists of Wayne county, was born at West Lebanon, this county, on
the 26th of June, 1851, and is the son of Michael and Nancy (Gramling)
Cramer. The Cramer family is traced to a German origin, though the sub-
ject’s maternal grandmother was a native of England. Michael Cramer was
born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, in 1815, and in his youth he accom-
panied his parents to Ohio, they locating at Fredericksburg. The father
was a tanner by trade and established a tannery at that place, which soon
grew to an important industry. He was an expert in his line and commanded
a large patronage, the farmers from all the surrounding country bringing
their hides to his tannery. Michael Cramer followed in his father’s foot-
steps and learned the trade of a tanner, establishing himself in business at
West Lebanon, where he continued in business until his death, which oc-
curred at the comparatively early age of forty-one years. He was one of
the best known men in this part of the country and he too commanded the
patronage of all the farmers in his community. He was industrious and a
good manager and was considered a very successful man for his day. He
built one of the first brick houses in West Lebanon, and in its construction
he paid the masons seventy-five cents a day, a wage that at the present day
would hardly be an inducement for a man to lay brick. He was a man of
decided domestx tastes and did not care to take an active part in the public
affairs of his day. At that time Massillon was the only town of any impor-
tance in this section of the state, being the main trading point, and West
Lebanon was a common stopping place for farmers on their way to Massillon.
Mr. Cramer and his wife were faithful members of the Church of God, and
he was generous in support of the society. He married Nancy Gramling, who
was a native of Pennsylvania, and came to Ohio at the age of nine years, the
family making the trip in a covered wagon. Her father had previously been
in Ohio inspecting the land and had walked the entire distance from his home
both ways. The ancestors of the Gramling family are supposed to have
come from Holland. Mrs. Cramer’s father was a cabinet-maker by trade, in
which he was employed all his life. He was of an inventive turn of mind and
constructed the first fanning mill ever in use in this part of the country.
Michael and Nancy Cramer were married at West Lebanon, and their union
was blessed in the birth of five children, namely: Henry, who died at the
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age of nineteen years, the result of wounds received during the Civil war,
while engaged in the battle at Floyd Mountain. He was a member of the
Twenty-third Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry and had served all but
twelve days of his three-year period of enlistment. Sarah married a Mr.
Frantz and lives in Sugarcreek township, this county. Two children died
in infancy unnamed. The subject of this sketch is the youngest of the
children.
John Cramer was reared under the parental rooftree and was given ex-
cellent educational advantages. He received his elementary training in the
common schools at West Lebanon, and supplemented this by attendance at
the Smithville Academy and Mount Union College. He then entered the Leb-
anon Normal School in Warren county, taking the course in surveying and
civil engineering, but left school before graduating. After completing his
studies he was for several years engaged in teaching school in Wavne and
Stark counties, but at length he turned his attention to agricultural pursuits,
in which he has been engaged continuously since. Mr. Cramer has resided
on his present place practically since he was three years old. His father
dying at that time, he was placed in the home of his Grandfather Gramling,
and the farm then owned by the latter is that now owned and operated by
the subject. It is a fine and fertile tract of land, considered one of the best
pieces of land in this part of the county, and it is splendidly improved and is
constantly maintained at the highest standard of excellence. Mr. Cramer
is practical and progressive in his ideas and he has left no stone unturned
to bring the science of agriculture up to the highest possible plane. In tlr’s
laudable effort he has succeeded to a gratifying degree. Mr. Cramer lives
in a conveniently arranged and attractive residence, which is fitted with
many modern and up-to-date conveniences, including a complete acetylene
lighting plant and running water in all parts of the house where desired.
The other buildings on the place are in keeping with the residence and the
general appearance of the whole property indicates the owner to be a man
of exceptional taste and sound judgment. He raises all the crops common to
this latitude, also giving considerable attention to the breeding and raising
of livestock, and is practical and progressive in his methods. Mr. Cramer’s
property is of additional value from the fact that underlying it is a magnifi-
cent bed of coal. Mr. Cramer has leased the coal rights to a Cleveland com-
pany which has sunk a shaft and is engaged in mining it. Large quantities
of the fuel are shipped constantly and from this source Mr. Cramer derives a
handsome royalty.
In 1882 Mr. Cramer was united in marriage to Emmeline Fisher, who
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was born February 12, 1862, near Mount Eaton, Paint township, this county,
the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Fisher. Her paternal grandfather,
Solomon Fisher, was a native of the Old Dominion and was one of the
earliest settlers in this part of Ohio. Hiram Fisher was well known and for
a number of years he served as court constable at Wooster. To Mr. and Mrs.
Cramer have been bom six children, namely: Bryant, of Alliance, Ohio,
where he is employed by a railroad; Mary, at home; George, who is a stu-
dent at Wooster University, where he is fitting himself for the profession
of civil engineering; Leroy, who is at home; the fourth and fifth in order of
birth died in infancy.
Mr. Cramer has not been an office-seeker in the popular acceptation of
the term, but he has served his fellow citizens as a member of the township
school board, having always taken a deep and commendable interest in edu-
cational matters. Mrs. Cramer is an earnest member of the Presbyterian
church at Mount Eaton. Mr. Cramer is not a member of the church, but gives
to it a liberal financial support. His political affiliation is with the Repub-
lican party.
The subject is one of the strong and sturdy men of his community and
has justly merited the high position which he now occupies in the estima-
tion of his fellow citizens. He is ever found on the right side of every
moral issue, and his support is freely given to every movement looking to
the advancement of the community in any way. Because of his sterling quali-
ties of character he is eminently deserving of representation in a work of this
character.
DANIEL BEALS.
Few men of Wayne county are as widely and favorably known as Daniel
Beals, of Paint township, where he was born on the 7th of February, 1833.
He is one of the strong and influential citizens whose lives have become
an essential part of the history of this section of the state and for years
his name has been synonymous for all that constitutes honorable and upright
manhood. Tireless energy, keen perception and honesty of purpose, com-
bined with every-day common sense, were among his chief characteristics,
and while advancing individual success he also largely promoted the moral
and material welfare of his community.
The subject's parents were Jacob and Besanba (Bowers) Beals, and
the former was the son of Abraham Beals, who came to Ohio in 1812 and en-
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tered large tracts of land in this part of Wayne county, of which he gave
each of his children a quarter section. He was a native of Lebanon county,
Pennsylvania, and he rode all the way to his new western home on horse-
back. He was one of the very first settlers here. At that time there was an
Indian reservation at Canal Dover, from which point there was a foot trail
to New Sandusky, to which place the early settlers had to go to secure salt.
Abraham Beals and his wife both lived to the age of eighty-six years.
Jacob Beals was bom in Pennsylvania and was married in that state,
though all his children were born after his removal to Ohio. These chil-
dren were Philip, Sarah, Rebecca, Solomon, Sabie, Elizabeth, Rachael and
Daniel, all of whom are now dead excepting the subject. The mother of
these children died at the age of seventy-six years. She was born in Penn-
sylvania and two brothers and a sister also came to Ohio. When she and
her husband came to Ohio and took up land, not a stick of it had been dis-
turbed by white hands, and to create a farm out of this dense wilderness was
a task of herculean proportions. But the sturdy pioneer had reckoned the cost
and courageously went to work cutting and burning the timber, building a
log house and cultivating the land. In due time what had formerly been the
primeval forest began to present a changed appearance, and soon fields of
ripening grain characterized what had been almost impenetrable forests. First
operations were primitive in the extreme and, as the nearest grist mill was at
Massillon, the pioneers grated the corn from which they made their first
bread or pone. Jacob Beals was considered a very successful man for his
day and was active in many lines of endeavor. In the work of the Methodist
church he took a very leading and prominent part, in this respect following
in the wake of his father, who had been instrumental in building the first
church in this part of the state, it being located in Stark county. Jacob
Beals was a justice of the peace in his community for eighteen years and also
at different times held all the other township offices, being also a notary public.
He was a man of unusual strength of character and possessed in a large de-
gree that quality commonly called '‘horse sense,” his counsel and advice being
often sought by those in need of counsel. In politics he was originally a
Whig, but on the formation of the Republican party he allied himself with
it and remained an ardent supporter of that party ever after. No man was
more prominent or better known throughout this section of the state than
was Jacob Beals, and his memory remains sacred to those who knew him.
The subject of this sketch secured his early education in the primitive log
school house of the early days, the school being in the beginning supported
by subscription. Later the free schools were inaugurated and the subject
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aided in the building of the first free school house in this section and was
himself made a member of the first school board, though then but a youth.
He remained at home with his parents until he was twenty-eight years of
age, and then, acquiring the ownership of the farm, his parents remained
with h;m, he taking the most painstaking and careful regard for their com-
fort. About twenty-eight years ago Mr. Beals relinquished active farm work
and moved to Orrville, for the purpose of giving his children better oppor-
tunities for education, and remained there eighteen years. While residing in
that city he engaged in the buggy business, in which he was eminently suc-
cessful, having made the record of selling two hundred and eighty-three bug-
gies in twelve months. He also engaged in handling livestock, buying and
shipping large numbers annually to the eastern markets. About 1899 Mr.
Beals and his family returned to the old home in Paint township, where he is
now living practically a retired life, in the enjoyment of a rest which he has
richly earned. He has been a very successful man and, despite much trouble
and many material losses, he is considered today one of the most enterpris-
ing and successful men in his part of the county. He has ever evinced a
spirit of progress and has always given an enthusiastic support to every object
or movement having for its ultimate end the advancement of the best inter-
ests of the community. A man of sterling qualities of character, he has
ever enjoyed the friendship of the best people in the community, and he now
enjoys the unbounded confidence and respect of all.
Mr. Beals has been twice married, the first time to Mary Scott, a daugh-
ter of Robert Scott, and to them were born four children, namely: Ottie
became the wife of Isaac Blackstone, of Orrville, and they have four chil-
dren; John married Adele Taggart and resides near Orrville; Emma is the
wife of Solon Byall, of Orrville, and they have two children ; William, of
Orrville, married a Miss Gardner and they have one child. Mrs. Mary (Scott)
Beals died October 20, 1885, and was buried in Crow Hill cemetery in Orr-
ville. She was a good woman and her friends mounied her loss. On October
20, 1899, Mr. Beals married Elizabeth Bookwalter, the daughter of Mr. and
Mrs. Martm Bookwalter. She died October 7, 1909, and was buried at Mount
Eaton. She was a lady of splendid personal qualities and was well liked by
all who knew her. Her parents were natives of Lancaster county, Pennsyl-
vania, and came to Ohio in about 1831.
In politics Mr. Beals has always been actively interested in the success of
the Democratic party, but has never been a seeker after office. Regardless of
this fact, he has been selected by his fellow citizens to serve in a number of
township offices and is now the incumbent of the office of township trustee, in
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which he is rendering the most satisfactory service. Religiously, he is a
member of the Methodist Episcopal church, belonging to the church of that
denomination at Orrville. Mrs. Beals is a member of the Universalist church
at Akron, Ohio.
WILLIAM ADDLEMAN.
There is no positive rule for achieving success and yet in the life of the
successful man there are always lessons which might well be followed. The
man who gains prosperity is he who can see and utilize the opportunity that
came in his path. The essential conditions of human life are ever the same,
the surroundings of individuals differ but slightly; and when one man passes
another on the highway of life to reach the goal of prosperity before others
who perhaps started out before him, it is because he has the power to use
advantages which probably encompass the whole human race. Today among
the prominent citizens and successful business men of Burbank, Wayne
county, Ohio, stands William Addleman. The qualities of keen discrimina-
tion, sound judgment and executive ability enter very largely into his make-up
and have been contributing elements to the material success which has come
to him.
William Addleman was born February 9, 1838, in Berlin township.
Holmes county. Ohio, and is a son of Adam and Susan (Shidler) Addleman.
The subject’s paternal grandfather, John Addleman, was a native of Penn-
sylvania and came to Ohio in a very early day, settling in Holmes county,
where he spent his remaining years, and died. The maternal grandparents,
John and Katherine Shidler, were also natives of Pennsylvania and likewise
early settlers of Holmes county. The subject’s parents were both born in
Pennsylvania, the father in Greene county and the mother in Washington
county. They were married in their native state and in the early thirties
came to Ohio. There the father died in 1840 and in 1846 the mother re-
married and came to Wayne county, where she lived until her death, which
occurred on June 3, 1891. Adam Addleman was a farmer by vocation and
was of a quiet and retiring disposition. He was, nevertheless, a man of ster-
ling qualities of character and enjoyed the respect of all who knew him.
William Addleman was born and reared in a typical log cabin of the
pioneer period and was reared to the life of a farmer, being at an early age
inured to the strenuous labor incident to farm life of that early day. He
secured a fair education in the common schools, and until he attained his
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majority he was occupied in assisting his father ’ in the tilling of the soil.
In i860 he went to Iowa and in October of the following year, responding
to his country’s call for aid in the suppression of the southern insurrection,
he enlisted as a private in Company D, Fifteenth Regiment Iowa Volunteer
Infantry. He rendered faithful service for one year, at the end of which
time he was discharged because of sickness. He took part in a number of
sanguinary conflicts, including the battles of Shiloh. Corinth and Iuka, be-
sides a number of minor engagements and skirmishes. He was employed on
guard duty a large part of the time. Enlisting as a private, he was suc-
cessively promoted, being a second lieutenant at the time of his discharge.
After leaving the army, Mr. Addleman remained in Iowa until the spring of
1863, when he returned to Wayne county, Ohio, and began working by the
month on farms. In 1864 he married and located on an eighty -acre farm in
Congress township, on which he remained during the following twenty
years. In 1884 he moved to Burbank and, forming a business partnership
with A. H. Overs, went into the hardware business, which he continued until
1887, when he turned his interest over to his son and has since that time
lived a retired life. During President Cleveland’s first administration he
served one year as postmaster of Burbank, giving a satisfactory administra-
tion. A man of strong mentality and naturally a keen business sense, Mr.
Addleman made a success of whatever he undertook and is now able to enjoy
that rest which he so richly earned during his active years.
In politics a Democrat, Mr. Addleman has taken a deep interest in local
public affairs, and in 1890 served as land appraiser. During the period
that he resided on his farm he served two terms as township trustee, school
director nine consecutive years and other minor local offices, the duties of
which he discharged with an eye single to the benefit of the community alone.
Socially he is a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, while his re-
ligious affiliation is with the Evangelical Association, to which he gives an
earnest support.
On the 25th of March, 1864, Mr. Addleman was united in marriage to
Susan Byers, a native of Congress township, this county, and a daughter of
David and Hettie Byers, natives of Pennsylvania and early settlers of Wayne
county. To Mr. and Mrs. Addleman have been born two children, namely:
John E., who, after completing his common school education, attended Ash-
land College and the Ohio Wesleyan University, entered the drug business
at Burbank, and served as postmaster during Cleveland’s second administra-
tion ; Bertha R. is at home with her parents.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
In the foregoing lines have been briefly set forth the salient facts and
some of the leading characteristics in the life of one of Wayne county's
most highly respected citizens. Commencing with a limited capital, but with
an inborn determination to succeed, and paving the way to prosperity only
with the solid rocks of honest industry, true stability of character and cor-
rect conduct, he has achieved success in the face of every obstacle and won
a name which when transmitted to posterity will ever shine with a radiance
emanating from a life of honor and integrity.
JOHN MESSNER.
In nearly every community are individuals who by innate ability and
sheer force of character rise above their fellows and win for themselves con-
spicuous places in public esteem. Such a one is the well-known gentleman
whose name appears above, a man who has been identified with the history of
Wayne county for over sixty-seven years, during which period his life has
been closely interwoven with the material growth and development of his
county, while his career as a progressive man of affairs has been synonymous
with all that is upright and honorable in citizenship.
John Messner was born on the farm which is now his home, his natal
day having been January 5, 1842. He is the son of John M., Sr., and Hannah
(Schweigert) Messner, both of whom were natives of Pennsylvania and of
sturdy German antecedents. They were married in their native state and
came to Ohio with their two children, locating about two miles from Mas-
sillon. There they remained about two years and then came to Wayne county
and bought the land which is now owned by the subject and which at that
time was in its original wild state, densely covered with the primeval forest
growth and inhabited by many varieties of wild animals. ’ To the arduous
task of clearing this land and putting it in cultivation the father applied
himself, and in due time saw the reward for his toil. John Messner, Sr.,
was a good farmer and did well everything he undertook. In connection with
farming he also raised large numbers of stock, and was considered a very
successful man for his day. He was a Democrat in political proclivities and
took a prominent part in local public affairs. He was widely and favorably
known throughout this section of the county. His religious belief was that
of the German Reformed church and he belonged to the church at Mount
Eaton. He was ninety years old at the time of his death, and his wife was
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eighty-five. They were the parents of eight children, namely : Amos, de-
ceased; Sarah is the wife of a Mr. Jarvis and lives in the West; Josiah is
deceased; William lives in Oklahoma; Savilla is deceased; Fyan married
Mr. Adams, an inspector of cattle for the government; the subject of this
sketch is the next in order of birth; Rebecca; Matilda, who is the wife of a
Mr. Ruch and lives at Mount Eaton.
John Messner received his education in the district school of his home
neighborhood, the schools of that early day being somewhat primitive in
methods and equipment. The pupils were required to chop wood for the
big fireplace and the building was furnished with rough puncheon seats and
floors, oftentimes greased paper serving as a substitute for glass in the win-
dows. The subject remained on the homestead during his young manhood
with the exception of six years spent on another farm in the county, and he
has always followed the vocation of farming, in which he has been uniformly
successful. He is now managing the home farm and is accounted one of
the most progressive and enterprising farmers in this section of the county.
He keeps in close touch with the most advanced ideas relating to the science
of agriculture and is not slow to adopt new methods when their practica-
bility has been demonstrated. The place is adorned with a full set of commo-
dious and well-arranged farm buildings and the general appearance of the
place indicates the owner to be a man of sound judgment and excellent
taste. He carries on general farming, raising all the crops common to this
section of the state, and in connection with his tilling of the soil he also gives
some attention to the raising of livestock, in which also he is successful.
On the 14th of June, 1864, Mr. Messner was united in marriage to
Mary Graber, who was born in Wayne county August 8, 1843, the daughter
of Samuel and Susan (Stauffer) Graber. Her parents were both born in
Germany, her father being ten years old and her mother seven years old
when they accompanied their respective families to the United States. They
came over in the old-time sailing vessels and were among the earliest for-
eign-born families to settle in Wayne county. To Mr. and Mrs. Messner
have been born seven children, namely: Lee, who married Ida Beal, was for-
merly a school teacher, but now owns a farm west of Apple Creek, where
he res:des; Emma is the wife of Frank Senff, a miller at Canton, Ohio, and
they have two children; Minnie is the wife of Dr. Edward P. Schaffter, for-
merly a veterinarian of Mount Eaton, and then became meat inspector for the
government, first at Kansas City and then at Cleveland and from there was
sent by the government to Liverpool, England, as inspector of cattle, where
he now resides with his wife and three children; Edwin, who married Laura
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Blosser, owns a farm east of Mount Eaton; Ella is the wife of Prof. Alton
Etling, superintendent of the Orrville public schools, and they have two
children ; Wilson, who is a school teacher, living at Mount Eaton, married
Esta Schaffter, and they have one child; Nora is the wife of Harvey Blosser,
a school teacher, living at Mount Eaton, and they have two children, twins.
Of these children, all have been engaged in teaching school at some period
of their lives excepting Emma, Minnie and Edwin.
A stanch Democrat in politics, Mr. Messner has been actively interested
in the success of his party and has himself held a number of local offices.
Religiously, he and his wife are consistent members of the Reforrrfed church
at Mount Eaton and are interested in all the activities of the society. Their
comfortable and attractive home is known far and wide because of the hos-
pitality ever in evidence there, and the members of this family are numbered
among the most popular residents of this section of the county. Mr. Messner
is a man of fine personal qualities and makes a friend of every one he meets.
WOOSTER NURSERY COMPANY.
No history of Wayne county would be complete without giving an ac-
count of the famous Wooster Nursery Company, an institution of which
any community might be justly proud. This flourishing company was incor-
porated four years ago under the laws of Ohio, wThich means that the stock-
holder is secure in every way. Starting from a small beginning, it has rap-
idly grown through the judicious and honest management of its officials until
its products are eagerly sought after throughout northern Ohio and other
sections of the Middle West. This is the result of the ambition and splendid
management of Thomas E. Ewing, the founder, who came to Wayne county
from Ashland, Ohio, in 1902, in which year, by his personal efforts, the
company, then in its infancy, received a great impetus, which it so much
needed. In 1903 he planted fruit and ornamental trees. There was a large
increase in the business in 1904 and at that time an increased acreage was
planted. They began growing garden and farm seeds in addition to their
trees in 1905. After the incorporation the company purchased twenty-six
and one-half acres adjoining the Experiment Station and this has proved to
be another one of the wise moves engineered by Mr. Ewing, as it could not
be excelled anywhere in Ohio for the nursery business. Their trees have given
the utmost satisfaction in every respect, one of their best points being a great
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fibrous root system and the trees can be dug without injury. Trees grown
on sand or low muck land are not so hardy or vigorous. In 1907 the busi-
ness increased to such proportions that more than twice the usual assistance
was required to properly handle the output. It also declared at that time a
ten per cent, dividend. This has been kept up ever since and it is possible
that the present year will see a much larger dividend declared, since large in-
creases in sales and orders have already been reported. The capital stock of
the company has been increased and is being offered in a limited way to the
public. According to those in position to judge such matters, the company's
offer is certainly a safe and sane investment and will, no doubt, be subscribed
faster than the officials anticipate.
The local trade increased so rap’dly that in 1908 it became necessary
to establish a down-town office, which was located on South Walnut street.
The well-known firm of seed men, E. C. Green & Son, of Medina, Ohio, was
consolidated with that of the local company and the combination is proving
to be a very strong one and a very satisfactory business is the result. Mr.
Green was brought up in the nursery business, his father being one of the
foremost nurserymen in Oh:o, and for a number of years Mr. Green was con-
nected with the Experiment Station. The location of these combined inter-
ests seems to have been a most fortunate one in every way.
The local trade grew to such proportions in 1909 that the company was
compelled to seek larger quarters and No. 40 South Market street was se-
lected. This soon proved too small and in the fall of the same year the of-
fices were moved across the street to the Foss building. No. 35 South Mar-
ket street, where they now occupy the entire first floor and basement with
their stocks and seeds for farm and garden, nursery stock in season, poultry
and bee supplies. They carry the Canton fertilizer exclusively and their
trade on this one article alone is over ten car loads per year. They also
handle spray materials and spray pumps. All the latest and best devices for
the care of orchards and gardens are to be found here in their neat and well-
arranged quarters where they have a floor space of nineteen by one hundred
and eighty feet and nineteen by one hundred and forty feet. Last year the
grounds of the nursery were planted heavier than ever, the trees, shrubs, etc.,
then on the place being valued at over ten thousand dollars.
This company has a number of interesting phases that commend them-
selves: It is a home concern and can be seen any time; the stockholders pay
no taxes on their holdings; the management is thoroughly experienced and
capable; they have been in business for a number of years and have proven
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
to be entirely safe, sane and conservative, good organizers and promoters
along legitimate lines. There is no reason why, in the language of Mr.
Ewing, they should not grow — they have the land, the men and the business.
The present officers of the company are such men of unquestioned integ-
rity as T. E. Ewing, president and manager ; E. C. Green, vice-pres’dent ; H.
L. Sanborn, secretary: W. J. Giffin. treasurer; T. E. Ewing, R. F. Wal-
lace, W. J. Giffin. Calvin and S. X. Green compose the board of directors.
Some insight into the life history of Thomas Edwin Ewing, the prime
mover in this noted enterprise and one of Wayne county's most progressive
and highly-esteemed citizens, would doubtless be appreciated by the readers
of this work, and in closing this sketch of the Wooster Nursery Company
we are glad to give the following facts in his life record. He was born near
Hayesville. Ashland county, Ohio, June 21, 1866, the oldest child of Sam-
uel J. and Elizabeth D. (Dobbs) Ewing, a h:ghly respected and influential
family of that place. His early education was gained in the common schools,
and he took a preparatory course in the academy at Hayesville, later attend-
ing Muskingum College at New Concord. He made a splendid record and
began teaching soon after finishing his school work, being well equipped
for this line of work, which he followed with marked success for a period of
three years, from 1884 to 1886 inclusive. But not taking kindly to the
school room and believing that his true forte lay in the business world, he
went to Mansfield, Ohio, in November, 1887. when twenty-one years of
age, and entered the implement business, in which he was very successful
and in which he remained unt:l 1908. After engaging in business for himself
for a period of four years, he came to Wooster in 1902, as before stated, and
organized the Wooster Nursery Company.
Mr. Ewing was married in 1889 to Minnie E. Long, a lady of educa-
tion and culture, the daughter of Mrs. Adam B. Long, of Loudonville, Ohio.
Mr. Ewing is a member of the United Presbyterian church, of which he
is a liberal supporter and interested worker, having held many of the hon-
orary offices in the same, and he is at this writing superintendent of the Sun-
day school, in which he is doing a very commendable work. He belongs to
the L7 nited Commercial Travelers, Wooster Council No. 196, and at present
is senior counselor. He has the interests of Wayne county at heart, being
public-spirted, always ready to assist in the furtherance of any cause for the
general good, and personally he is a man of unswerving integrity, kindness,
charitable, genteel and trustworthy, according to those who know him best,
and he has hosts of friends wherever he is known.
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WILLIAM M. MELLINGER.
In examining the life record of William M. Mellinger, one of the pro-
gressive and well-known citizens of Plain township, Wayne county, we find
that he is the possessor of those elements which always make for success.
Earnest labor, unabating perseverance, good management and a laudable am-
bition— these are the elements that have brought him a comfortable compe-
tency and the good will of his fellow men. His career has ever been such
as to warrant the trust and confidence of the business world, for he has ever
transacted all business on the strictest principles of honor and integrity. His
devotion to the public good is unquestioned and arises from a sincere interest
in his fellow men.
William M. Mellinger was born September 7, 1843, on °ld home
farm in Plain township. A history of his parents and the other members of
the family will be found complete on another page of this work, entitled,
“A Brief History of the Mellinger Family,” consequently only those items
bearing directly on the subject of this review himself will be brought out
here.
Mr. Mellinger began Working on the old home farm when he reached
proper age, attending the district schools during the winter months in Plain
township. He later attended the Fredericksburg Academy under V. C.
Smith, obtaining a very good education. He first turned his attention to
teaching, alternating the same with sawmilling for a period of seventeen years,
and for seven years additional continued teaching, winning a wide reputa-
tion throughout this locality as an educator second to none in Wayne county,
his services having been in great demand ; however, only ten years of that
time were spent in Wayne county, three years having been devoted to this
work in Lake county and twelve years in Preble county, Winning, in each of
the latter, a reputation for thoroughness and ability in his work as he had
done in Wayne county. After he abandoned sawmilling he took up farming
in Summit county; but in 1897 he returned to Wayne county and he and his
sister bought two hundred and twenty-four acres of the fine farm his grand-
father had taken up from the government. It is located in Plain township,
the original farm consisting of five hundred and eighty-four acres, and Mr.
Mellinger has since devoted his attention to general farming with his usual
success. Politically he is a Democrat and while living in Preble county he
held the office of justice of the peace, also held the same office in Wayne
county, in all twenty-one years, giving entire satisfaction in the same. The
early members of the Mellinger family belonged to the Mennonite church,
but William M. belongs to the Reformed church.
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
FRANKLIN HOLMES.
The history of the loyal sons and representative citizens of Wayne county
would not be complete should the name that heads this review be omitted.
When the fierce fire of rebellion was raging throughout the Southland,
threatening to destroy the Union, he responded with patriotic fervor to the
call for volunteers, and in some of the bloodiest battles for which that great
war was noted proved his loyalty to the government he loved so well. Dur-
ing a useful life in the locality where he lives he has labored diligently to
promote the interests of the people: at the same time he has lived up to a
standard of citizenship that has brought to him the friendship and regard
of all who know him.
Franklin Holmes is a native of Wayne county, Ohio, having first seen
the light of day near Pleasant Home on the 4th of February, 1844. He is
descended from German ancestry and his paternal grandparents, Daniel
and Charlotte Holmes, were natives of Pennsylvania and came to Wayne
county, Ohio, in 1812. Here they took up one hundred acres of land and the
father devoted his active years to that vocation. They are both now deceased.
The subject's maternal grandparents. David and Eve Weaver, were also
natives of the Keystone state, who came here in 1812 and took up one
hundred and sixty acres of government land, on which they spent their re-
maining (lavs. Children of these grandparents, Jacob Holmes and Chris-
tena Weaver, married and settled near Pleasant Home, where the father suc-
cessfully prosecuted agriculture, having owned one hundred and twenty-two
acres of land at the time of his death. He was a quiet and unassuming man,
inclined to be retiring in disposition, but was possessed of sterling qualities
of character which gained for him the sincere respect of the entire com-
munity. They were members of the German Reformed church, to which
they were generous contributors. They were the parents of eight children,
seven of whom are now living. Jacob Holmes was born April 2. 1814. and
died August 16. 1901. His wife, who was born in 1829, died March 27. 1891.
The subject of this sketch secured his early education in the common
schools of the home neighborhood and remained with his parents until the
outbreak of the Civil war. He gave unmistakable evidence of his patriotism
by enlisting, on August 15, 1862, in Company E. One Hundred and Twen-
tieth Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and served faithfully with this com-
mand until the close of the war. He took part in some of the most sangui-
nary conflicts of that great struggle, including, among others, Chickasaw
Hluff. Arkansas Post, Thompson Hill. Raymond. Jackson, Miss., twice, siege
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of Vicksburg, Champion Hill, besides many minor engagements and skir-
mishes. He saw much arduous duty and was sick four weeks at Young's
Point, lying under an ordinary tent. At Snaggy Point Mr. Holmes, to-
gether with about half the members of the regiment, was captured by the
enemy and they spent thirteen months in the Confederate prison at Camp
Ford, Texas.
At the close of hostilities, Mr. Holmes and his fellow-prisoners were re-
leased and he at once returned home and took up again the vocation of
farming, to which he had been reared. Buying a comfortable place at Pleas-
ant Home, he has here made his home ever since. He has done a good deal
of well drilling in this county, being considered an expert in this line, and
he has also farmed much rented land. He is a wide-awake man of affairs
and has been active in prosecuting his affairs.
In 1868 Mr. Holmes was married to Clara J. Harbaugh, the daughter
of Daniel and Mary Harbaugh, early settlers in Wayne county. Her father
died in 1862. To Mr. and Mrs. Holmes have been bom three children,
namely: Xettie is the wife of J. E. Matthews, of Ashland; Jennie Goldie
is the wife of Frank Clippinger, of Collingwood, Ohio; Clyde Monroe is a
carpenter by trade and lives at Ashland.
In politics Mr. Holmes gives a warm support to the Democratic party,
though he has never been an aspirant for office of any nature. His fra-
ternal relations are with the Grand Army of the Republic, where he and his
old comrades-in-arms review the days of the early sixties and rejoice to-
gether in a reunited country. In religion Mr. and Mrs. Holmes are mem-
bers of the Evangelical church, to which they give an earnest support. Mr.
Holmes is a man of even temperament, calm and self-poised, of refined char-
acter, and is an honored and interesting gentleman. He has earned for him-
self an enviable reputation as a careful man of business, and in his dealings
is known for his prompt and honorable methods, which have won for him
the deserved and unbounded confidence of his fellow-men.
JOHN DAVID BERGER.
Of the sturdy German element that has done so much for the develop-
ment of Wayne county from the earliest pioneer times to the present day,
the name Berger is ind:ssolubly associated, for the several members of this
hardv and industrious familv have shown that thev are deserving to rank with
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
the county’s best citizens in all phases of life, business, political and social.
One of the best-known representatives of the present generation is John Da-
vid Berger, the popular proprietor of the West End Restaurant, Wooster.
He was born at Mount Eaton, Paint township, Wayne county, Ohio, June
4, 1856, the son of Gottlieb and Louisa (Grosjean) Berger, a highly respected
family and well known in Paint township. The father was a stone-mason
and was considered an excellent mechanic and in many places in the county
may be seen the monuments of his handicraft, for his services were in great
demand for many years. Gottlieb Berger was one of Wayne county's patri-
otic citizens who gave their services to the government during the troublous
days of the sixties, enlisting in Company C, One Hundred and Seventh Regi-
ment Ohio. Volunteer Infantry, and r;ght gallantly he participated in the
trying campaigns and bloody engagements of the same. Owing to the fact
that his war record formed one of the principal chapters in his life, the history
of this regiment is herewith appended.
Capt. Gustave Bueckling’s company of the One Hundred and Seventh
Ohio Infantry was raised chiefly in Wooster, from the patriotic Germans of
that city. Recruiting for it commenced the latter part of July, 1862, and the
company was soon filled to its maximum. In August it was ordered to Cleve-
land, where it was incorporated with the rest of the regiment whose fiel !
officers were : Seraphim Meyer, colonel ; Charles Mueller, lieutenant-colonel ;
George Arnold, major. Soon after organization the regiment was ordered
to join the Army of the Potomac. Its first important battle was Chancellors-
ville, where, as a part of Gen. O. O. Howard's Eleventh Corps, it was terribly
handled by Stonewall Jackson, this regiment losing two hundred and twenty
men killed, wounded and captured in this battle. Its next general engage-
ment was at Gettysburg, where the regiment was almost annihilated, losing
over four hundred men in killed, wounded and prisoners, out of five hundred
and fifty that entered the battle. August 1, 1863. this regiment sailed ;n
transports to Folly Island, South Carolina, and performed picket duty there
until Tanuary, 1864. From there the regiment was taken to Jacksonville,
Florida, where it had several skirmishes with the Confederates. It returned
to South Carolina on March 23, 1865, and met a detachment of the enemy,
defeating him, capturing three pieces of artillery, six horses and fifteen pris-
oners. The regiment did provost duty in Charleston, South Carolina, dur-
ing the balance of the service until July 10, 1865, when it was mustered out
and sent home to Cleveland, where it was discharged. The regiment was
made up of Germans, and was considered a very fine one, its members dis-
playing their earnest patriotism and heroic valor on many occasions.
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Gottlieb Berger died of typhoid fever at Brooks Station. Virginia, leav-
ing a widow and four small children. The mother, a woman of strong mind
and willing hands, reared her children in comfort and respectability, educat-
ing them and starting them out on life's, highway prepared for its various
vicissitudes, and she is still living at Mount Eaton ; however, the near rela-
tives of the children assisted in their bringing up, John David, of this review,
having lived with an aunt near Mt. Eaton until he was sixteen years of age,
and in that district he attended the common schools. He then worked as a
farm hand until he was twenty-two years of age. In March, 1878, he mar-
ried Johanna L. Tracy, daughter of Jacob and Phoebe Tracy, a highlv-re-
spected family living near Apple Creek, and to this union one child was born,
Mrs. Carrie Olive, who lives in Akron, Ohio.
Soon after his marriage, Mr. Berger bu;lt the Maysville Drain Tile
Works at Maysville, this county, and for five years operated the same very
successfully, then sold out to the Sauvine Brothers, who now manage it.
Mr. Berger then traveled for the Underwood Whip Company for a period of
five years, the factory being located in Wooster. He succeeded in building up
an excellent patronage for this firm. Then for several years Mr. Berger en-
gaged in the laundry business on East South street, his business increasing
gradually; but he desired to launch into the restaurant business and is now
and for the past four years has been proprietor of a well-conducted, attractive
and exceptionally well managed restaurant at No. 26 West Liberty street,
enjoying a very substantial trade which is rapidly increasing, owing to his
quick and courteous treatment of patrons, his desire to please and his con-
scientious business methods, which have characterized his entire career. He
serves meals, hot and cold lunches at all hours and handles fine cigars and
tobaccos. This is a meeting place for farmers. He is politically a Democrat.
DAVID P. SHIE, M. D.
Starting in life under unfavorable environment and beset by many obsta-
cles, Dr. David P. Shie is deserving of a great deal of credit for what he has
accomplished in subsequent years, for he stands today in the front rank of one
of the most exacting and trying professions and is comfortably established in
Orrville and known throughout Wayne county as one of her leading citizens.
He was born at Bedford, Coshocton county, Ohio, February 22, 1862, the
son of Peter Shie, a native of Germany, who came to America when fourteen
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years of age, locating with his father in Ohio. He is still living on a farm
at Monroeville, Allen county, Indiana, at the age of seventy-eight years. He
owns one hundred acres of excellent land and is prosperous. He married
Lucy Rowe, who was born near Farmerstown, Holmes county, Oh:o, and she
died when her son, David P., was seven years of age. She was the mother
of four children, namely: J. \V. is living at Piqua, this state; W. H. died in
1892 at Hastings, Michigan; David P., of this review; Mary, wife of P. W.
Riffle, a pob'ceman of Canton, Ohio. Peter Shie married a second time, his
last wife being Elizabeth Middough, of Farmerstown, Holmes county, and
ten children were born to this union, nine of whom are living. Peter Shie,
grandfather of the Doctor, was a fanner, as was also Grandfather Jacob
Rowe, who lived in Holmes county.
Doctor Shie lived on the home farm until 1873, assist:ng with the various
duties on the same and attending the neighboring schools. When his father
removed to Allen county, Indiana, young David P. remained on the parental
farm until 1879. In that year he left Indiana and returned to Ohio. He
received his education principally at Berlin, Holmes county; he began teach-
ing school in 1881 and continued teaching for nine years during the winter
months. He made a success in this profession, but desiring to enter the
medical profession, he studied medicine during the last three years he was
teaching. In 1890 he entered Starling Medical College at Columbus, where
he remained for one year, then finished his medical education in the Ken-
tucky School of Medicine at Louisville, graduating from the same on June
22. 1892. In July of that year he located at Fredericksburg, Ohio, where he
was successfully engaged in the practice for a period of nine years. On Jan-
uary i. 1902, he moved to Orrville, Wayne county, and has been practicing
here ever since, having built up a lucrative patronage with the town and
surrounding country and often being called to remote parts of the county.
As a general practitioner and diagnostic’an he has no superiors in Wayne
county and he is kept very busy attending to his numerous patients.
Doctor Shie was married on December 30, 1883, to Ella G. Kohr, daugh-
ter of Michael T. Kohr, of Strasburg, Ohio, in which place Mrs. Shie was
born. On November 6, 1884, their oldest child, William Ray, was born; he
is now seal clerk of the Pennsylvania Company and has the esteem and con-
fidence of the company; Marvin DaCosta was born December 2, 1893, and is
now in high school, graduating in 1911 ; a daughter, Ida Elizabeth, was born
March 1, 1891, and died when eleven days old. Both the sons are living at
home.
Doctor Shie belongs to the Wayne County, State and American Medical
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Associations. He has served on the local school hoard, and he has been a
member of the Methodist church since he was nineteen years of age. His
wife and sons are also members of this church. Fraternally the Doctor be-
longs to the Masons, Knights Templar and the Knights of Pythias. He is
a splendid type of the sturdy, self-reliant, progressive, self-made man, hav-
ing made his own way in the world since he was seventeen years of age. He
is not only up-to-date in the strictest sense of the term in his profession, but
he is a well-read man on current topics and deeply interested in whatever
tends to promote the general good, especially of Wayne county. He is known
as a man of strict integrity and all gentlemanly qualities and is therefore held
in high esteem by all who know him.
OLIVER GEORGE GRADY, M. D.
Notwithstanding the long strides that have been made in the practice
of the healing art within the past half century, the discovery of medical
properties in hundreds of vegetable and mineral substances that not many
years ago were not included in materia medica as remedies or barely men-
tioned in the pharmacopeia or laid dormant as far as the dispensary is con-
cerned; notwithstanding the charlatancy practiced by adventurers in the
legitimate practice of the art and the quacks that claimed particular and
special gifts in the treatment of human ills; and notwithstanding the fact
that legislatures have found it necessary to regulate the general practice by
the expulsion of diplomaless pretenders and the registration of legitimate and
truly scientific physicians, there are some of the latter who have risen to
eminence within the field of their actual labors, and their examples are being
emulated by younger men in the profession who are conscientious and who
are wise enough to see that the greatest and best success must come to them
by practicing their profession along legitimate lines. One of these is Dr. O.
G. Grady, one of the youngest but most promising of Wayne county’s physi-
cians, whose office in Orrville is already a busy place, because he has, during
his brief practice, proven to be not only well read, capable and thoroughly
competent to carry on the work of a general practitioner, but also that he is
a man of unswerving integrity and honor, therefore inspiring confidence in
his patients, who are rapidly increasing.
Doctor Grady was born in Wheelersburg, Scioto county, Ohio, March
28, 1884, the son of William Henry and Mary Preston (Burke) Grady, the
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latter the daughter of O. H. P. Burke, of Burke’s Point, Ohio, he being
one of the pioneers and best known citizens of Scioto county. William
Henry Grady was for a period of twenty- four years one of the best known
school teachers of Scioto and Adams counties, beginning teaching when six-
teen years of age; he was superintendent of the schools at Wheelersburg and
West Union, in Adams county, and he taught penmanship in the Portsmouth
school, was superintendent of the schools at Union Mills, near Portsmouth.
He left the school room where he had been very successful to accept a posi-
tion as bookkeeper for the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company at Colum-
bus, Ohio, where he remained for one year, then returned to Wheelersburg
where he taught for three years and then took a position as transfer agent
of the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company at Columbus, remaining in
that capacity until 1906 when he was appointed state examiner in the state
bureau of inspection, which position he still very creditably holds.
To Mr. and Mrs. William Henry Grady two children were born : Dr.
O. G., of this review, and Newton Burke, who is at this writing a medical
student in the Starling Ohio Medical College at Columbus.
Doctor Grady was reared on a farm. He walked one mile to attend the
district schools for five years. When thirteen years old he moved to Colum-
bus and attended the graded schools, with two years in the north high school,
and he graduated from the Wheelersburg high school with the class of 1901,
and during the summer of that year he attended the normal school at Lucas-
ville, Ohio. From November 1, 1901, to February 1, 1902, he worked for a
grocery company, then worked for the Smith Brothers Shoe Company until
September 21st following, foreman of the finishing department, in Columbus,
Ohio. He then began work for the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company,
having been appointed general storekeeper and chief clerk to the general
foreman of the Scioto Valley division, which position he filled with entire
satisfaction until September 21. 1905, when lie resigned, for the purpose of
gratifying an ambition of long standing — to begin the study of medicine.
He at once entered the Starling Medical College of Columbus, Ohio, where
he studied until April 20, 1906. From that date until September 12th follow-
ing he worked as a machinist’s helper in the Norfolk & Western railroad
shops for the purpose of paying his expenses through college. Then he
re-entered the above mentioned institution where he studied until May 1,
1907. From April, 1907, to October, 1908, he was a locomotive fireman
on the Scioto Valley division of the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company.
During the summer of 1907 the Starling Medical College and the Ohio
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Medical University combined, forming the Starling Ohio Medical College,
from which Doctor Grady was graduated with a most excellent record on
May 18, 1909, successfully passing the examination of the state board the
following June. He at once opened an office at No. 310 East Rich street,
Columbus, Ohio, and remained there until August 5th following, when he
came to Orrville, Ohio, and opened an office where he expects to remain
permanently, having now built up a very satisfactory patronage, his services
already being in great demand throughout the eastern part of Wayne county.
Doctor Grady was married on June 11, 1906, to Jennie Mae Bowers, a
cultured daughter of an excellent Columbus, Ohio, family and this union
has resulted in the birth of one child, a son, bearing the name of James
Henry, who was born on April 24, 1907.
The Doctor belongs to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and
Engineers, Lodge No. 545, also to a local medical frternity in Columbus —
the Phi Sigma Psi — and to the national medical fraternity, the Alpha Kappa
Kappa; he also belongs to the Wayne County Medical Association. He is
medical examiner for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the
Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Engineers and the Order of Rail-
way Conductors, also for the Mutual Life Insurance Company. He also be-
longs to the Modern Woodmen of America and the Ohio State Medical Asso-
ciation.
GEORGE A. McILVAINE.
To a great extent the prosperity of the agricultural sections of our coun-
try is due to the honest industry, the sturdy persistence, the unswerving per-
severance and the wise economy which so prominently characterize the farm-
ing element in the Buckeye state. Among this class may be mentioned the
Mcllvaine family, members of which have not only attained a well-merited
material prosperity, but have established a reputation for honesty that any
community might be proud of. The earliest representative of this family
came to Wayne county, Ohio, in the pioneer days and ever since that time
his descendants have been active in developing the agricultural interests of
the county.
George A. Mcllvaine was born on the old homestead at Jackson, Canaan
township, Wayne county, in 1851, the son of George Mcllvaine. The reader
is referred to the sketch of D. W. Mcllvaine, on another page of this work,
for a full history of the ancestry of this family. Suffice it to say here that
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both the grandfather and father of the subject were men of sterling worth and
succeeded in establishing good homes here.
George A. Mcllvaine was reared on the old home farm in this county,
assisting his father in completing the clearing of his place and developing
the farm. The former was born in the second log house built by his grand-
father. He was educated in the home schools of Canaan township, also at-
tended the Canaan Academy, obtaining a good education. After leaving
school he chose farming as a life work, and accordingly rented a farm which
he worked until his father’s death, when he built a house on a part of the
home place and continued farming there on twenty-six acres, which he still
owns and which he now devotes to truck and general farming, making a
very comfortable living, finding a ready market for his products. He has
a neat and cozy home and everything about his little place is kept in first-
class condition.
George A. Mcllvaine was married in 1875 to Anna Marsh, daughter of
William and Syntha (Benjamin) Marsh; the former was an early settler
in Creston, Wayne county, where he farmed for some time, then engaged in
merchandising until his death. To Mr. and Mrs. George A. Mcllvaine the
following children have been born : Roy, Earl, deceased; Benjamin, Ross
and Deane.
Mr. Mcllvaine and family are members of the Presbyterian church; he
is a Democrat in his political affiliations.
PETER WEIKER.
Upon the roll of the representative citizens and prominent and progressive
farmers of Wayne county consistently appears the name which appears at
the head of this sketch. Mr. Weiker has been a resident of this county
since his youth and has worked his way to a position of marked precedence
in connection with agricultural affairs, while he is held in unqualified esteem
by the people of the community.
Sturdy German blood flows in Mr. Weiker’s veins, his ancestors having
been natives of the Fatherland. His paternal grandfather. George Weiker,
was a native of Pennsylvania, but came to Wayne county. Ohio, some time
in the twenties. Ilis son. Adam Weiker, father of the subject, and who
had preceded his father to this state, was a gunsmith bv trade and had fol-
lowed that occupation during his life in his native state. During the twenties
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he emigrated to Wayne county, and after a time he bought a fine farm of
one hundred and seventy acres located in Franklin township, which he
greatly improved and on which he lived during the remainder of his life.
He married, in Pennsylvania, Mary Read, also a native of that state, and
their union was blessed in the birth of ten children, namely : Mary, deceased ;
Samuel, William, Jane, Peter, the subject of this sketch : Rachael, Margaret,
Sarah, Elmira and Caroline.
Peter Weiker, who was born in Wayne township, this county, April
7, 1834, was reared to the life of a farmer and as soon as old enough he
was put to work assisting in the manifold duties of the farm. His opportu-
nities for securing an education were meager, his attendance at the district
school having been limited, but this deprivation was largely made up in after
years by much reading and deep thinking, as well as through habits of close
observation, so that Mr. Weiker has been considered a very well-informed
man. He remained with his father, assisting on the farm, until he had at-
tained his majority, and then he and his brother Samuel took charge of the
home farm and for twenty-one years they operated it together. In 1877
the subject purchased his present splendid farm of one hundred and fifty-four
acres in Congress township, to which he has since given his undivided atten-
tion. On this place he erected a splendid residence and a good set of farm
buildings, commodious and well arranged, and he has been successful here
to a very gratifying degree. He is progressive in his methods and energetic
and persistent in his efforts, so that he has been able to realize large returns
for the labor which he has bestowed so unstintingly. The appearance of the
place indicates to the passerby that the owner is a man of excellent taste
and good judgment.
On the 26th of October, 1858, Mr. Weiker was married to Mary Cutter,
who was born in Franklin township, this county, the daughter of John Cutter,
an early settler and prominent farmer of that township. To this union were
born these children, namely: Walter, a carpenter living at Cleveland: Harry,
deceased; Maggie died in infancy; Anna M. Mrs. Mary Weiker died in Au-
gust, 1876, and on May 22, 1879, Mr. Weiker married Savilla Coup, the
daughter of Dr. Jacob Coup, of Plain, Ohio. Her death occurred June 22,
1899. Mrs. Anna M. Holmes, the wife of Horace B. Holmes, now lives on
the old homestead and keeps house for the subject.
In politics Mr. Weiker has given a consistent support to the Democratic
party and has always been interested in his party's success. He has not, how-
ever, ever sought office for himself. His religious connection is with the
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Progressive Brethren church, a branch of the Dunkards. In every relation
of life Mr. Weiker has proven himself the possessor of such qualities as are
bound to win in any line of effort and he has won and retains the esteem
of all who know him.
DAVID C. AMSTUTZ.
A highly respected and influential citizen of Milton township, Wayne
county, is David C. Amstutz, who was born January 4, 1842, in this town-
ship, on the old homestead, the son of Ulrich and Katherine (Logabill)
Amstutz, the former a native of Berne, Switzerland, born April 26, 1801,
and died March 19, 1881. Katherine Logabill was also born in Switzerland,
May 14, 1809, and her death occurred September 6, 1873. They were of ex-
cellent families of the little republic that has sent so many good citizens to
this country. It was about 1826 when they came to America with their par-
ents. They came to Wayne county direct, locating in Greene township, and
after a few years they were married here and bought a farm of one hun-
dred and sixty acres in Milton township, where Mr. Amstutz lived until his
death. He was a hard-working man and made a very comfortable living for
himself and family. Both he and his wife were prominent in the affairs of
the Mennonite church. They were the parents of thirteen children, two dy-
ing in childhood ; two sons and two daughters died after reaching maturity ;
five sons and two daughters are now living.
David C. Amstutz received a common school education in the public
schools of Milton township, assisting in the meantime in clearing the home
place, and there lived until his marriage, which event occurred on July 15,
1865, and was solemnized with Fannie 5teiner. On March 20, 1866, he re-
turned to his father’s place and began farming, which he continued there until
1872, in which year he purchased eighty acres of the homestead and in 1882
bought another eighty acres of the old farm. There he lived and prospered
until 1883, when he moved to about one-fourth mile south, where he had
built a fine home, and since then he has lived there, the date of his occupation
of the new home having been January 18, 1883. He carries on general
farming and stock raising, but since 1882 he has lived practically retired,
merely overseeing his farnvng operations. Politically he is a Democrat. He
is a member of the Mennonite church, to which his wife also belonged. Mrs.
Amstutz passed to her rest on November 3, 1902, without issue.
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Mr. Amstutz was married a second time, his last wife being named
Fannie Steiner also, but no relation to his first wife; this wedding occurred
on July 1, 1906.
Mr. Amstutz has been very loyal to the church and has so fixed his will
that his entire real estate will divert to the Mennonite board of missions and
charities, with the charge that it shall be devoted to the Old People’s Home.
In 1899 Mr* Amstutz was the organizer and promoter of the building of
the Old People’s Home, and in 1901 several persons were placed in the home,
since which time it has been under the management of a superintendent and
matron.
Mr. Amstutz’s first wife was the daughter of Christian Steiner, who was
born July 29, 1806, and died May 16, 1885, when seventy-eight years old
He married Maria Steiner (no relation). This was his third wife; the other
two wives were Stanfer and Katherine Amstutz. To his first wife two chil-
dren were born, both dying in childhood, then Mrs. Steiner died. He had
six children by his second wife, two dying in infancy; then the death of Mrs.
Steiner occurred. Fifteen children were born to Mr. and Mrs. Christian
Steiner, seven of whom grew to maturity, six still living.
The parents of the second wife of David Amstutz were Daniel Steiner,
born December 2, 1822, and Magdalena Steiner, born February 2, 1829. Mr.
Steiner died December 16, 1909, at the age of eighty-seven years and four-
teen days. His widow is still living north of Orrville, at an advanced age.
On February 15, 1872, Mr. Amstutz was ordained a minister in the
Mennonite church and in 1885 he was ordained as bishop, thus proving that
he is a man of unusual force of character and intellect.
The children of Christian and Katherine Steiner were: Lydia, born
March 22, 1832; Peter, July 17, 1833; Christian, March 11, 1835, died in
April, 1909; Barbara, born August 27, 1836; John, born July 25, 1838, is de-
ceased; Anna, born December 29, 1840, died December 28, 1906. The broth-
ers and sisters of David C. Amstutz are as follows, those deceased named
first: Katherne, March 27, 1838, died March 16, 1873; married Peter J.
Steiner, who was born May 24, 1835, and died March 8, 1883; Frederick,
born March 17, 1828, died January 10. 1899; John, October 17, 1829, died
February 11, 1899; Lavina, wife of Abraham Burkholder, was born July
9, 1853, died August 3, 1903; those living are, Peter, at Smithville; Jacob,
at Sterling; Daniel; Joel B., living at Sterling; Fannie, widow of Abraham
Fisher, who was born in 1838 and d:ed November 15, 1876; Lydia is the wife
of Daniel Steiner.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MELLINGER FAMILY.
The history of the Mellinger family may be accurately traced to Melchor
Mellinger, the great-grandfather of the writer, who was born in Baden, Ger-
many. In 1772, while yet a young man, with his wife and two children, — a
son, Benedict, and a daughter, Anna, — he started to seek his fortune in the
colonies of the new world. His wife fell ill while crossing the Atlantic ocean
and died, her remains being left in the sea. After landing in America, he set-
tled in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, and in a few years married again, to
which union were born a number of sons and daughters, who, as they grew
up, were scattered, some of them going to other states and some remaining
in Pennsylvania. One son, Jacob, and one daughter, Elizabeth — as far as
known to the writer — came to Ohio and lived in Columbiana county, where
the city of Letonia is now situated. The dates of the birth and death of
Melchor Mellinger are unknown to the writer.
In both Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, and Columbiana county, Ohio,
are still living quite a number of descendants of Melchor Mellinger. Bene-
dict, the son of the first marriage, was born in Baden, Germany, October 25,
1770. He lived with his father and stepmother in Pennsylvania till grown
to manhood, and was married to Barbara Binkley, to which union were born
the following children while living in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania: Fro-
nica, born February 6, 1794; David, December 31, 1795; Anna, April 12,
1797; Barbara, March 18, 1799; Mary, September 22, 1800; Elizabeth, Feb-
ruary 3, 1803. They owned a little home and followed weaving for a liveli-
hood; also raised flax, prepared it for the loom, and wove it into cloth suit-
able for clothing such as was then used by both men and women during the
summer season. They also carded wool by the use of hand-cards, spun it,
and wove it into cloth. Money being very scarce and hard to get, even for
the products of labor, they, in this way, were enabled to make the necessary
clothing for the family, and the little money that could be made by weaving
and selling cloth, was carefully laid by for a larger and better home in the
future. By the most rigid economy they were enabled to accumulate suffi-
cient money with which to purchase more land, and in 1805 they removed
from Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, and came to Columbiana county. Ohio,
where they purchased a small farm. They hired their farming done in part,
and devoted their attention to raising flax and the manufacture of cloth
from it : also the Wool of their own growing, together with that brought to
them to be spun and woven into cloth.
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While living in Columbiana county the following children were added
to the family: John, born September 20, 1805; Benedict, March 20, 1808;
Catherine, December 4, 1810; Esther, January 30, 1814. While living there,
Benedict Mellinger’s full sister, Anna, who came with the family from Ger-
many, settled there and bought land adjoining that owned by the Mellingers,
she being married to Harmon Brown. They remained in Columbiana county
until 1816, when both families removed to Wayne county, Ohio, where one
son, Christian, was born April 7, 1818. Mr. Mellinger bought a large tract
of land in Plain township from the government, all in timber, which was
cleared by the family, with some outside help, and prepared for the plow. The
Indians, bears and deer were their neighbors. But in a few years other white
settlers came from the eastern states and a community was formed. When
they had cleared a part of the land and had erected suitable buildings, Bene-
dict Mellinger and the family began ra:sing flax and wool and started the
spinning-wheel and the looms, which were the products of his skill as a me-
chanic. They became experts in designing patterns for woolen coverlets
and linen tablecloths, and the products of their ingenuity and skill are still
to be met with in the form of linen cloth and woolen coverlets, manufactured
by them from materials in their crudest form.
After living in a log cab;n for some years, they built a large two-story
frame house, thirty by forty feet, which was looked upon as almost a marvel
in the then “back woods.” They did all the carpenter work themselves,
employing a mason to build the cellar walls and a plasterer to plaster the walls
inside. Benedict Mellinger lived to see the country cleared of its timber and
prepared for agriculture, the hills dotted with school houses and churches.
While living in Wayne county the following members of this family
were married: John, to Hannah Casebeer; Benedict, to Sarah Casebeer;
Catherine, to William Sp:ttler; Esther, to Henry Gines; David, to Mary
Felger: and Christian, to Elizabeth Showalter. The three oldest sons, John,
Benedict and David, each received a farm from their father, the same being
parts of the home tract purchased from the government, and lived there to
the time of their deaths, except Benedict, who spent the latter part of his life
with one of his daughters. Sp:ttler bought a farm near Mohicanville, Ash-
land county, Ohio, and remained in that vicinity the balance of his life.
Gines went to Illinois, which was then the “far West,” and purchased a farm
there, remaining on the same the rest of his life. Christian lived with his
parents until their deaths. The five older daughters, Fronica, Barbara, Anna,
Mary and Elizabeth, never married, but remained on the farm with their par-
ents and younger brother during their lifetime and were cared for by him in
the:r old age.
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The family is remarkable for its longevity. The following are the dates
of death and age of the family: The father, Benedict Mellinger, died Au-
gust 11, 1851, aged eighty years, nine months and seventeen days; Barbara,
his wife, died April 27, 1863, aged ninety years and fifteen days: Fronica
died July 3, 1887, aged ninety-three years, four months and twenty-seven
days; David died November 27, 1862, aged sixty-six years, ten months and
twenty-six days; Anna, February' 5, 1884, aged eighty-six years, nine months
and twenty-three days; Barbara, January 24, 1885, aged eighty-five years,
ten months and six days; Mary, December 4, 1890, aged ninety years, two
months and six days; Elizabeth, March 15, 1891, aged eighty-three years,
one month and twelve days; John, October 23, 1872, aged sixty-seven, one
month and thirteen days; Benedict, Jr., May 12, 1892, aged eighty-three
years, one month and twenty-three days; Catherine, August 16, 1875, aged
sixty-four years, eight months and twelve days; Esther, February 12, 1890,
aged seventy-six years and twelve days; Christian, March 18, 1894, aged sev-
enty-five years, eleven months and nine days.
The wife of Christian Mellinger survived him twelve years, dying June
23, 1906, aged eighty-four years, eleven months and thirteen days. The chil-
dren of Christian and Elizabeth Mellinger are William, Darnel, Belinda and
Franklin. William married Samantha Buckwalter, October 26, 1869, to
which union were born three children, namely : Clement, George and Har-
vey. Clement died in infancy; the other two boys are unmarried in 1909.
Franklin married Alice Rouch and they are the parents of one child, a daugh-
ter, Odessa. Belinda and Daniel never married.
Benedict Mellinger’s full sister, Anna, married Harmon Brown, re-
mained in Wayne county for some time, and then located in Licking county,
Ohio, where many of their descendants are still to be found. Anna, a daugh-
ter of the Browns, married Jesse Arnold, some of whose descendants are liv-
ing in Wayne county.
One of Benedict Mellinger’s half sisters, a descendant from the second
marriage of Melchor Mellinger, married Jacob Oberholtzer, whose descend-
ants are still found in Wayne county and in some other parts of the state.
— By William M. Mellinger.
WILLIAM HENRY DEUELL.
Admired and respected for his general intelligence and his progressive
spirit, as well as for his sterling qualities as a neighbor and citizen, no man
in Canaan township. Wayne county, stands higher in public esteem than the
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879
worthy individual the salient features of whose life and characteristics are
herein set forth.
William H. Deuell was born at Canton, Stark county, Ohio, on July 12,
1856, and is the son of Jesse and Martha (Becher) Deuell, the former a na-
tive of Carroll county, Ohio, born in 1831, and the latter born in Stark county,
Ohio, in 1835. The subject’s paternal grandfather was Tobias Deuell, who
was a native of Maryland and one of the first settlers in Carroll county, Ohio.
He there became the owner of a large farm and lived there during the re-
mainder of his life, dying at the remarkable age of one hundred and two
years, eleven months and twenty-two days. The maternal grandparents of
the subject, John and Polly Becher, were from Lancaster county, Pennsylvania,
and were also early settlers in Stark county, Ohio, where
the father acquired a half section of government land. He stood high in
the community, having served as a justice of the peace for thirty-six years,
and for thirty-two consecutive years he served as postmaster at Sparta, Ohio.
Jesse Deuell, the subject’s father, lived on his father’s farm in Carroll county,
until the outbreak of the Civil war, when he enlisted in the Third Regiment
Ohio Cavalry, with which he participated in a number of the heaviest engage-
ments of that terrible struggle, including the battle of Gettysburg. He was
captured twice, having escaped after his first capture on the way to Ander-
sonville prison, and after his recapture he again escaped and found his way
back to the Union lines. During the last two years of his service he was an
orderly sergeant. After the war he went to Canton, Ohio, first carrying on
farming operations near there, and subsequently entering the contracting busi-
ness, in which he was successful. He was a Republican in politics. To him
and his wife were born the following children: Corvan, William H., Lizzie
(who married Emanuel Young), Elmer, Alfred, Emma (who married Perry
Christy), Harry and Margaret, who became the wife of a Mr. Wolfred.
William H. Deuell received a good practical education in the public
schools of Canton, but at an early age he went to work on farms by the month,
being so employed for ten years. He then went into the sawmill and timber
business at Canton, and shortly afterward became a contractor, and in this
capacity he constructed many sewer systems and pavements at many points in
Ohio. He followed that line of business until the spring of 1909, when he
retired to a farm of one hundred and sixty-seven acres in Canaan township
which he had purchased in 1904, and he has since made that his home. He
carries on agricultural operations, to which he gives a fair amount of atten-
tion, but his chief interest lies in the breeding and racing of fine horses, in
which he is achieving a distinctive success. He has three fine pure-bred stal-
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lions, two Percherons, Sir George and President, and a coach horse, Duke.
These are fine animals and Mr. Deuell is justifiedly proud of them.
Mr. Deuell has been twice married, first to Emma Markley, who was
born in Paradise, Ohio, the daughter of John Markley, a successful farmer
of that place. To this union was born one child, Harry, born February 2,
1883. On February 5, 1901, Mr. Deuell married Emma Boyce, who was
born in August, 1872, near Mansfield, Ohio, the daughter of Josiah Boyce,
an early settler and farmer there. In politics Mr. Deuell is a stanch Repub-
lican, but in local elections he assumes an independent attitude, believing that
the candidate’s personal fitness for office should be paramount to all other
considerations. Mr. Deuell is a thorough and broad-gauged business man, a
progressive and public-spirited citizen, and is well known and uniformly re-
spected throughout the county.
THOMAS ARMSTRONG, JR.
Wayne county, Ohio, is characterized by a full share of the honored
pioneer element who have done so much for the development of the county
and the state and the establishment of the institutions of higher civilization
in this fertile and well-favored section of the old Buckeye commonwealth.
The biographical sketches in this work are to a large extent in recognition
of those who are pioneers or members of pioneer families, and it is signally
fitting that there should be perpetuated records which will defy the ravages of
time and betoken to the coming generations the earnest lives and devoted
labors of those who have been such noble contributors to the state's pros-
perity and pride. The subject of this sketch is one of the honored citi-
zens of the county, where he has been for many years successfully engaged
in agricultural pursuits and where he has maintained his home from the
days of his childhood, representing a period of sixty-five years of consecutive
residence in the county.
Tracing the ancestral history of the Armstrong family, it is learned
that the subject’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Armstrong, Sr., was born
August 22, 1776. in Northumberland county, Pennsylvania, where he was
reared to manhood. After his marriage he moved to Columbiana county,
Ohio, and lived there until the war of 1812. After the surrender of General
Hull at Detroit, the subject volunteered and was commissioned captain and
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came with the forces under General Bell to Wooster, Ohio. On the con-
clusion of hostilities he returned to Columbiana county, and in the spring of
1815 he came to Wayne county and settled on Clear Creek. Subsequently
he came to what is now known as the Armstrong farm in Canaan township,
which Jand he had entered from the government in 1811. Here he lived
until his death, which occurred on March 2, 1842. His wife, who was born
in 1779 in Columbiana county, Ohio, survived him a number of years, dying
on April 14, 1856. His children were William, John, Thomas, Harrison,
Eliza, Juliana, Hannah, David, Jane and Calvin. Of these William, who
was born in Northumberland county, Pennsylvania, in 1802, .came to Wayne
county in 1815. with his father and the other members of the family, and
during the first years of their residence here much strenuous work was per-
formed in the clearing of the land and putting it in shape for cultivation.
William was extensively associated with his father in the handling of land
and at one time he was the owner of between five hundred and six hun-
dred acres. William Armstrong was twice married, first to Mary Rose, a
native of Columbiana county, Ohio, and to them were born the following
children: Mrs. Jane Smith, of Medina county; John, of Iowa; Mrs. Julia
Slemmons, deceased ; Thomas, the subject of this sketch ; Harrison, of Wayne
township, this county; Mrs. Mary Slemmons, of Sterling, Ohio. After the
death of his first wife. William Armstrong married Catherine McFerson, of
Columbiana county, and they became the parents of two children, William
E., of Wooster, and Mrs. Isabelle Elizabeth Wilson, of Doylestown, Ohio.
The subject’s maternal grandparents, John and Mary Rose, were natives of
Pennsylvania and in an early day came to Wayne county and took up land.
The life record of the subject of this sketch presents no exciting or thrill-
ing chapters. He was born on the home farm in Canaan township, this
county, in 1844, and received his education in the common schools of his
home neighborhood. He remained with his father until he was twenty-three
years of age, when he moved to another farm in Canaan township, where he
has since devoted his attention to agricultural pursuits. His place comprises
one hundred and seventy-six acres, which are highly improved, and here Mr.
Armstrong carries on a general line of farming, and in this line he has
achieved a distinctive success. The property, which is eligibly located, is
well improved and contains a full set of well built and conveniently arranged
farm 1 nildings, which are at all times maintained in the best of repair, the
general appearance of the place indicating the owner to be a man of sound
judgment and good taste.
( 5r>)
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In 1864, when the fires of southern rebellion were burning fiercely, the
subject enlisted in the defense of Old Glory, joining Company A. One Hun-
dred and Sixty-ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, for the one-hundred-day
service, but he remained in the service until the close of the struggle and
the dove of peace once more hovered over the land.
On the 2Cth of October. 1868. the subject was married to Sarah Keeney,
who was born in 1848, and is the daughter of Thomas and Catherine ( Elliott)
Keeney. The father was born in Canaan township, this county, on July 15,
1825. and the mother was born at Duncan’s Island, Pennsylvania, May 17,
1827; they were married March 18, 1847. To Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong the
following children have been born: Zeno, born October 1, 1869, died Sep-
tember 5, 1872; Frank, born January 13, 1872, a farmer of Wayne township,
married a Miss Garver, and they have two children. Evelyn and Grace; Clyde
C, born April 8, 1880: Grace U., born March 11, 1883, married Emmet
Carmony, of Wayne township. Mrs. Armstrong’s paternal grandparents
were Simon and Sarah (Shankland) Keeney, the former born at East Hart-
ford, Connecticut, September 29. 1790, and the latter born December 27,
1794, their marriage being consummated on July 26, 1821. This was his
second marital union, his first wife having borne the maiden name of Polly
Daniels, who died seven years after their marriage, leaving three sons and a
daughter. After his second marriage Mr. Keeney came to Ohio, locating
first on the Killbuck river, but, because of the prevalence of ague there, he
came to Canaan township, Wayne county, where he made his home for fifty-
five years. He took up government land here and at one time was the owner
of an entire section.
Mr. Armstrong devotes his time and attention closely to his own business
affairs. He is a man of strong purpose and unfaltering industry, and by
the capable management of his place he has gained a comfortable compe-
tence. His friends — and they are many — know him to be a reliable and
enterprising gentleman, faithful to his duties of citizenship and working in
harmony with all progressive measures for the general good.
W. FRANK SELL.
In reverting to the lives and deeds of those who helped to initiate and
carry on the onerous work of developing the virgin wilds of Wayne county
and thus laying the foundation for that prosperity and precedence which
now characterize this favored section of the Buckeye state, it is imperative
that recognition be had of the Sell family, who have been identified with the
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history of the county from an early date and whose members have invariably
maintained the highest standard of integrity and honor, commanding une-
quivocal respect and esteem.
The subject’s paternal grandparents, David and Elizabeth Sell, were
natives of Pennsylvania, and were early settlers in Ohio, having settled in
Stark county, where they acquired a tract of land wh;ch had been but par-
tially cleared. This task was completed by Mr. Sell, who here developed a
good farm and established a comfortable home. They became the parents of
the following children: Christina, Samuel, John, Catherine, David, Louis,
Elizabeth, Daniel and Jacob. Of these, John, Catherine and Jacob are the
only ones now living. On the maternal side, the subject's grandparents were
Jacob and Elizabeth Read, who also were natives of Pennsylvania and pioneer
settlers in Stark county, Ohio.
Jacob Sell, father of the subject of this sketch, was reared on the paternal
homestead in Stark county and in the common schools of that neighborhood
he received his education. When he attained to manhood’s years he learned
the trade of a carpenter, and this vocation he followed for some years. He
then returned to the work to which he had been reared, that of farming, and
was so engaged during the following five years in his home county. In i860
he came to Canaan township, Wayne county, and bought a farm of one hun-
dred and sixty acres, on which he has resided continuously since. The farm
was but slightly improved when he acquired possession of it, but he has
made many permanent and substantial improvements on it and today it is
regarded as one of the best farms in Wayne county. Mr. Sell was prospered
in his farming operations and was enabled to add to his original possessions
from time to time, having bought tracts of sixty-one acres, sixty-three acres
and eighty acres, all excepting the last one adjoining the homestead. Mr.
Sell has been a hard-working man during the years since he first settled on
this farm, but now he has practically retired from the more arduous labor of
the farm and is enjoying that rest which he has so richly earned. He is a Re-
publican in politics and has ever taken an active interest in the success of his
party and in local public affairs. In religion, he and his wife are members
of the Presbyterian church, to which they give a generous support. Jacob
and Ella Read were married in 1867 and their union has been blessed in the
birth of the following children: Matilda, Charles E., W. Frank and Ella.
W. Frank Sell was born on the old family homestead in Canaan town-
ship, Wayne county, in 1869. He was reared by his parents and received his
educat:on in the common schools of Canaan township. His education was
not limited to his school training, however, for he has throughout his life
been a close reader of the best current literature and has been a close observer
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of men and things, and is today considered a well-informed man. He was
early initiated into the mysteries of successful agriculture and continued as
h;s father’s assistant on the home place until his marriage. He then located
on a farm immediately adjoining the home farm on the south, the tract com-
prising eighty-seven acres, and here he has since been engaged in general
farming. He is diversified in his operations, raising all the crops common
to this lat’tude. and in connection with the tilling of the soil he also devotes
some attention to the breeding and raising of livestock, and in both of these
lines he has been fairly successful, being considered one of the enterprising
and progressive farmers of the township. The property is adorned with a
neat and well-arranged set of farm buildings, which are kept in the best of
repair, and the general appearance of the place indicates the owner to be a
man of good judgment and sound ideas. In addition to farming his own land.
Mr. Sell is also engaged in operating his father’s land comprising the old
homestead.
Mr. Sell is essentially public spirited in his attitude toward all move-
ments having for their object the betterment of the community in which he
lives and is considered one of the influential citizens of the township. In
matters political he has rendered a stanch support to the Republican party’ and
has held the offices of township supervisor and school director, discharging his
official duties to the ent;re satisfaction of his fellow citizens. His religious
belief is that of the Presbyterian church, to which lie and his wife belong,
and he has served efficiently as superintendent of the Sunday school for three
years.
On the 25th of December, 1889, Frank Sell was united in marriage to
Clara Brinkerhoff, who was born in Canaan township, this county, on Au-
gust 13, 1870, the daughter of Amos Brinkerhoff, who is mentioned elsewhere
in this work. To this union have been born three children, Goldy Macy,
Jacob Glenn and Eva Lucile. Mr. Sell stands high in the estimation of his
fellow citizens. Throughout his career he has been emphatically a man of
enterprise, positive character, indomitable energy and liberal views, and is
thoroughly identified in feeling with the growth and prosperity of the county
which has so long been his home.
ORANGE W. FRARY.
This sterling representative of one of the pioneer families of Wayne
county, Ohio, is a native son of the county in which he now lives, where he
was reared to maturity on a farm, early beginning to assume the practical
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responsibilities of life and lending his aid in connection with the operation of
the home farm. That he has l;ved and labored to goodly ends is clearly in-
dicated in the position which he holds in the confidence and high regard of
his fellow men and in the success which has crowned his efforts as an ex-
ponent of the basic art of agriculture, which has been his vocation throughout
his entire business career. His fine farm is located in Canaan township and
no resident of the community commands a fuller measure of respect and es-
teem. This brief epitome of his life history will be read with interest by his
many friends and will serve as a permanent memorial to his sterling character
and worthy life.
Orange W. Frary was born on the paternal homestead in Canaan town-
ship, Wayne county, Ohio, on the 10th day of July, 1868, and is a son of
Asa Frary. His paternal ancestors as far back as can be traced were New
England Yankees and in that section of the country were born and reared
his paternal grandparents, Orange and Jerusha Frary. They were married
in their native state, and in a very early day they emigrated to Ohio, which
at that time was considered a frontier state. Locating in Wayne county, they
created a comfortable home and acquired a modest estate, where they spent
their remaining years and died. The subject's maternal grandfather, Cor-
nelius Seeley, was a native of Ohio, his family having been among the first
comers here. Mr. Frary’s parents were O. Asa and Florentine (Seeley)
Frary, the former of whom was born in Vermont in 1830 and the latter
near Evans, Ohio. The father was reared to the life of a farmer, which pur-
suit he followed throughout his life, his death occurring in February, 1906.
His wife had died in 1878. Asa Frary was a great home man. He was an
enthusiastic farmer and nothing diverted him from his family and his farm.
In politics he was a Republican and gave a proper attention to public affairs,
giving h;s support to every movement calculated to benefit the community.
He was not an office-seeker, however, and public preferment would have
been extremely distasteful to him. He was at one time, however, induced to
serve as trustee of Canaan township and gave to the discharge of his official
duties the same careful and painstaking attention that he gave to his private
affairs, retiring from the office with the highest esteem of his fellow citizens.
He and his wife were the parents of four children, all of whom are living.
Orange \Y. Frary was reared to the life of a farmer and secured his early
education in the district schools near his home. His youth was spent as the
assistant of his father in the cultivat:on of the farmstead and upon attaining
his majority he started out on his own account. He is now the owner of one
of the finest farms in Canaan township, which he is operating with a very
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gratifying degree of success. The farm, which comprises one hundred and
sixty-six acres, is what was formerly known as the Bowman farm, and is very
eligibly located, including some of the most fertile soil in this section of the
county. Mr. Frary is wide-awake and progressive in his methods and in con-
nection with the cultivat;on of the soil he is engaged quite extensively in the
poultry business, in which he has achieved a distinctive success. He is a close
student of the latest ideas relating to the breeding and raising of the feath-
ered fowl and is considered an expert in this line.
Mr. Frary was united in marriage to Ora Whonsetler, the daughter of
Samuel L. and Adeline (Snell) Whonsetler, the former of whom was born
on the Showalter farm in this county and the latter in Pennsylvania. Samuel
Whonsetler was reared to the life of a farmer and followed that pursuit until
his retirement from active life, when he removed to Canaan Center, where he
now makes his home. He is one of a family of thirteen children, seven
of whom lived to mature years. To Mr. and Mrs. Frary have been born six
children, namely : May, Effie, Bertha, Zenas, Oliver and Alice. The paternal
grandparents of Mrs. Frary were Daniel and Susana (Hewitt) Whonsetler,
Who were natives of Pennsylvania. The former came to Ohio on horseback,
took up land located just north of Canaan Center, and after clearing a small
tract of land, built a small house. He then returned to his native state and
brought his family to their new home, the family and household goods being
brought by wagon. He then proceeded with the clearing of the land and in
due time found himself the possessor of a fine farm. He lived there until
his death and acquired not only material property but also the confidence
and esteem of all who knew him. Mrs. Frary’ s maternal grandparents were
Jacob and Margaret (Smith) Snell, who also were natives of the old Key-
stone state. They came here at an early day and settled on land just south of
Canaan Center, where they rented for a short time. Eventually they bought a
fine farm located four miles south of where the subject now fives and there
they spent the remainder of their days.
In politics Mr. Frary gives his support to the Republican ticket on na-
tional elections, but in local affairs, where no great issues are involved, he
supports the men he considers the best qualified for the offices to which they
aspire. He is classed among the representative agriculturalists of Wayne
county and his career is in many respects worthy of emulation. A man of
independent and earnest thought, his line of action has come from a line of
reasoning based upon his own observation and familiarity with passing events,
not being governed by the ideas of others unless they seem to him based on
sound principle and reason.
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ELMER F. MYERS.
The family of this name in Wayne county was founded by Samuel and
Hannah Myers, who came to this section in 1832 and settled on a half sec-
tion of land in the eastern part of Congress township. They farmed this
land successfully after the methods prevailing at that early time, lived the
quiet lives usual to people in sparsely settled neighborhoods and were finally
gathered to their fathers without blame or reproach. They were interred
in the cemetery located on their homestead, where also three others of the
name have been laid by their side. Among their children was Solomon
Myers, who was born in Berks county, Pennsylvania, in 1829, and came to
Ohio with his parents. He married Elizabeth Xaftzger, a descendant of
early pioneers and a native of Harrison county, Ohio. Her grandparents,
Jacob and Elizabeth Xaftzger, were very prominent members of the United
Brethren church and the first meeting of this denomination in Ohio was held
at their home. The parents of Mrs. Myers were David and Susan Xaftzger,
natives of Harrison county, Ohio, and who were among the first settlers of
Congress township, in Wayne county. They took up a quarter section of
land and spent all their active lives in clearing, improving and cultivating it,
eventually making it quite valuable. They were, like their ancestors, quite
enthusiastic members of the United Brethren church, and always took much
interest in the local gatherings of the denomination. The Xaftzgers, for
generations, were always considered good citizens, good neighbors and re-
liable in all the relations of life. Solomon Myers lived on a part of his father's
farm in Congress township during the entire period of his activity. He was
successful as a farmer and a man of sterling integrity and supported the
Democratic party, but later became an ardent Prohibitionist, voting the ticket
of that party for many years. After the death of his first wife, he married
Maggie Guthrie, the full list of his children being as follows: David A.,
deceased; John F., a resident of Burbank; Emma, deceased; Elmer F. ;
Susan, deceased; Zeno, of Congress township, and Annabelle, the latter
being the only child by the second wife. He was also a very active Chris-
tian marr, being a member of the United Brethren church all his life. He
was class leader for fifty-five years.
Elmer F. Myers, son of Solomon and Elizabeth Myers, was born in
Congress township, Wayne county. Ohio. March 15, 1862. He was edu-
cated in the district schools near his home, and later attended the Xorth-
v estern Ohio Xormal University at Ada. He remained on the farm, help-
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ing his father, until the completion of his twenty-third year, when he de-
cided to begin life on his own account. Matrimony is usually the prime cause
of this step in the case of young men and Mr. Myers was no exception 1 *
the rule. On December 18, 1884, he was married to Sarah, daughter of
Samuel and Susanna Whonsetler, a well-to-do and highly respected family
of Wayne county. In 1840 Mr. Whonsetler came from Washington county,
Pennsylvania, and settled on a farm in Canaan township, whfere he pros-
pered by hard work and good management and at his death owned two hun-
dred and sixteen acres of land. Mrs. Myers was born on this farm, Octo-
ber 10, 1862, and besides herself there were ten other children. To E. F.
Myers and wife were born two children: Zora, wife of Merton Talley, of
the commercial department of the Denison high school, and Clyde, who is
his father’s assistant on the farm. In 1885 Mr. Myers began renting the
home farm of his father-in-law and after the mother-in-law’s death he
purchased one hundred forty-one acres in iyoo. since which time he has occu-
pied and cultivated it with entire success, giving much attention with gratify-
ing success to livestock. Mr. and Mrs. Myers are very active members of
the Lutheran church, and he is a Democrat in politics. He is public-spirited
and was a member of the school board a number of years.
WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON WERTZ.
The name of this prominent citizen of Dalton, Sugar Creek township,
Wayne county. Ohio, would indicate that he was named for one of the great-
est generals and presidents of America, and while he may not have the
capacity and necessary qualifications for either a leader of men in battle or
statesmanship, he has shown by his successful life work that he is the pos-
sessor of sterling qualities which in every cummunity must command the
highest respect. As a matter of fact in 1838. General Harrison gave Mr.
Wertz's father a dollar to name his son after him. Mr. Wertz was bom
in the house in which he now lives in Dalton, January 14. 1838. which was
the first two-story house to be erected in that place. It is of hewn logs, but
has been weatherboarded ; however, the many fine walnut logs used in its
original construction would be very valuable for luml>er now. He is the
<011 of John and Priscilla ( Hemperty ) Wertz, who were married in Wooster,
Hliio. in 1828. Locating in Dalton, they remained here the rest of their lives,
establishing a hotel, which they conducted successfully. Later Mr. Wertz
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purchased land and became a well-to-do farmer, although he continued to
give most of his attention to his hotel. John Wertz was the son of Henry
Wertz, a native of Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, the former having mi-
grated to Wayne county, Ohio, in about 1826. He took considerable inter-
est in the affairs of the Whig party. He was the father of fifteen children,
twelve of whom grew to maturity ; those living at present are: C. S., R. V.,
W. H. H. (subject), Mrs. J. M. Palmer and Mrs. Florence McGill. The
father of these children died in 1856, a highly honored and influential man.
W. H. H. Wertz was reared in his native community, having assisted
his father with the work on the farm and about the hotel. He was a very
industrious and ambitious lad, and at an early age was sent to a subscription
school and received a good education for those days. He was enabled to begin
teaching, which he did very successfully, later using the money he saved from
his labors as teacher to take him to the West, where he soon spent all he
had saved; but, nothing daunted, he cast about for something to do in order
to start over again. He was prospered and has ever since worked for himself
and given employment to many others. He is still actively engaged in busi-
ness, having acquired large possessions through his able management and
thrift, holding both valuable landed possessions and other property, owing
at this time over four hundred acres of as fine land as could be found in
Wayne county, which means that it is as good as any in the United States,
for this county ranks second in the Union in point of wealth and productive-
ness. Besides his personal property of this nature, he is a large stockholder
in the First National Bank of Dalton, of which he is president, ably discharg-
ing the duties of the same and giving this institution a prestige second to
none in the county. He has long ago established a reputation for industrious-
ness and rare business acumen, managing his many affairs with ease and dis-
patch. having innate ability as an organizer and promoter. He is deserving
of the high esteem in which he is held in this community owing to the fact
that he has made what he has unaided and in an honest manner. But while
he has labored to advance his own interests he has not neglected the general
interest of the community which he has long honored with his citizenship,
being liberal in his support of all movements having for their object the
public good, whether political, civic or material.
Mr. Wertz was married in i860 to Caroline Shusser, a native of York
county. Pennsylvania, having been born there in 1843. a woman of culture
and many praiseworthy characteristics and a member of a fine old family.
She has proven a great helpmeet to Mr. Wertz and much of his large success
has been due in no small measure to her encouragement and counsel. Mr.
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and Mrs. Wertz are the parents of four children, two of whom are living,
namely: Mrs. C. J. Harrold, wife of the present county clerk of Wayne
county and a prominent attorney of Wooster. E. S. Wertz is the other child.
When Mr. Wertz was married he was not blessed with an abundance of
this world’s goods, but he went to work with a will, having those qualities
of determination and perseverance, and in a short time had a good start. He
opened a grocery and drug business in Dalton, which he followed with marked
success for a period of twenty-five years, and in connection with his store
he at one time added a nursery line, making it a very thriving business. Dis-
posing of his grocery and drug store, he entered the lumber business and
soon had a liberal patronage, — in fact, in whatever he has turned his atten-
tion to he has been rewarded with abundant success, owing to his exercise of
good common sense and his fairness in his dealings with his fellow men, his
integrity having never been questioned.
Fraternally Mr. Wertz is a Mason, a member of the Independent Order
of Odd Fellows and the encampment, the Knights of Pythias, being a char-
ter member of the last two named. No people in the eastern part of Wayne
county are more highly honored or better known than Mr. and Mrs. Wertz,
and their pleasant and substantial home is often the gathering place for
numerous friends and admirers, for here they always find a free hospitality
that smacks of “ye olden tyme.,,
CLINTON M. ORR.
When Hugh Orr, founder of the family of that name in the West,
left his native Ireland in 1801 to seek his fortunes in the New World, the
trip across the Atlantic was something of a venture. Fulton had not as yet
invented steamboats and those wonders of the deep did not come into vogue
until many years later. The only mode of ocean travel was by sailing boat,
which was slow and uncertain, often taking from six weeks to two months to
cross over. The young Irish boy, like many others of his unhappy land,
secured steerage passage, as his funds were low. and turned his face reso-
lutely toward the free land beyond the deep waters. He had courage, youth,
strength and ambition, but these were his only equipment and when he
stepped ashore at New York he felt that he was a stranger in a strange land.
The tide of emigration was at that time setting strongly towards the new
territories beyond the Alleghanies and he determined to join the rush. The
journey was long and tedious, over rough roads, high mountains and down
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the various water courses which intersected the vast region south of Lake
Erie. Hugh Orr finally reached his destination and began looking for an
available situation in the county of Wayne, a part of Ohio Territory, which
at that time had not been admitted into the Union and was cheap, it
being possible to obtain land from the government for a mere pittance. Hugh
Orr secured a quarter section in East Union township, adjoining what was
afterwards known as the county infirmary farm. It was all wild land and
in fact that whole section was still little changed from the primeval wilder-
ness. The labor of clearing and improving such a tract could only be known
to the sturdy pioneers who went through them and cannot even be guessed at
by those who now own the smiling farms and highly cultivated acres of
modern Wayne county. In 1830 Hugh Orr bought the farm in Canaan
township on which he lived until his death. The place descended to his son,
James Orr, who managed and worked it successfully for many years and
also ended his days on the same old homestead. He was born in East Union
township, before the removal to Canaan, and in early manhood was married
to Melissa Barnes, a native of West Virginia who had come to Ohio with
her parents at an early day. This union resulted in a large family, most of
whom are still living and have done fairly well in the various walks of life.
The list as compiled from the family register reads thus in consecutive
order: Meroa (who died at the age of fifty-four), Sarah, Emma, Sophronia,
Hugh, Robert (who died in infancy), Levi, George (who died in infancy),
Naomi, Charles, William and Clinton.
Clinton M. Orr, youngest of this large family, was born in Canaan
township, Wayne county, Ohio, on November 9, 1873. His birthplace was
on the old farm owned and occupied by his father during his lifetime and
now his own property and place of residence. Mr. Orr grew up on this
farm and attended the nearby district school during the winter months. He
was thoroughly trained to farm work in his youth, learning all about the
putting in and the gathering of crops, the feeding, breeding and caring for
livestock, and all the other things which enter into the making of a good
farmer. So when he became the landowner on his own account he was well
qualified to take charge of the business. He has always lived on the home
place and knows no other business than farming and he has made a success,
being regarded as one of the progressive young farmers of the later genera-
tion. He leads a quiet, unobtrusive life, attends strictly to his own business,
is just in his dealings and enjoys the good will of his neighbors. In 1903
Mr. Orr married Daisy, daughter of Isaac and Emily (Leiter) Hawk, of
Stark county, where the family is well known.
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892
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
IRA BRINKERHOFF.
For many years Ira Brinkerhoff has occupied a conspicuous place
among the agriculturalists of Wayne county, Ohio. His career has been
that of an honorable, enterprising and progressive business man, whose well-
rounded character has enabled him to take an active interest in everything
pertaining to the advancement of the community and to keep well informed
concerning the momentous questions affecting the nation.. In all life's rela-
tions he has commanded the respect and confidence of those with whom he
has come in contact and his upright life is an inspiration to all who know him
well and arc familiar with his character.
Ira Brinkerhoff was born on the old Brinkerhoff homestead in Con-
gress township, Wayne county, Ohio, on the 29th of June, 1858. and is the
son of James and Elizabeth (Ewing) Brinkerhoff, the former a native of
Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, born October 11, 1817, and the latter born
March 30, 1825. in Congress township, Wayne county, Ohio. The subject’s
paternal grandfather, Daniel Brinkerhoff, was born March 14, 1780, in Cum-
berland county, Pennsylvania, and he married Rebecca Frazier, who was
born June 15, 1783. They were married in 1809 ancl his death occurred in
1848; she died in 1892. Daniel Brinkerhoff came to Wayne county, Ohio,
settling first in Wayne township, but a short time afterwards he bought the
place of one hundred and sixty acres in Congress township on which the
subject of this sketch now lives. The place was densely covered with the
primeval forest growth and Mr. Brinkerhoff entered at once upon the hercu-
lean task of clearing this and putting it under cultivation. A log cabin was
erected where the present residence stands and a happy and comfortable
home was established, albeit lacked many of the comforts and luxuries
which characterize the homes of the present day. Here the subject's father,
James Brinkerhoff, labored in the arduous toil of the first few years and he
spent the remainder of his life here. James and Elizabeth Brinkerhoff be-
came the parents of the following children: Amos, born February 11. 1846:
Rebecca, born January 14, 1848, the wife of Jonathan Fetzer, of Chester
township: Elizabeth Jane, born March 30, 1850. died December 15, 1854:
William, born September 7. 1854. living in Canaan township: Martha, born
January 3, 1855. married John Winters, of Wooster; Ira, born June 29,
1858. lives on the home place, and is the immediate subject of this sketch:
Anna, born May 22, i860, died March 9, 1892. was the wife of William
Barnard, of Congress township: James, born July 30, 1864, lives in Canaan
township : Jane, born August 7, 1867. died in infancy. James Brinkerhoff.
Sr., was a stanch Democrat in politics and in religion he gave his support
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
893
to the Presbyterian church. The subject’s paternal grandfather, William
Ewing, was one of the very earliest residents of Canaan township and his
brother Simon was the first white male child born in the township, 1817.
Ira Brinkerhoff was reared by his parents and secured his education
in the district school at Golden Comers, supplementing this by attendance
at the high school at Burbank. He has, with the exception of one year
spent in Michigan, spent his entire life with his parents on the old home
farm. He was reared to the life of a fanner and in his early years he saw
much arduous toil, assisting in bringing the farm to that splendid condition
which has since characterized it. After completing his education, he was
for a time employed as a collector and in various other capacities, but event-
ually he went to farming and stockraising on shares with his father, in both
of which lines he was eminently successful. At his father’s death, he as-
sumed charge of the home fann, and has since continued its operation. He
has proven himself a man of progressive ideas, keeping in close touch with
the latest advances in the science of agriculture and he is not slow to adopt
those methods which appear to him as sound and practical. He has thus
acquired a well-merited reputation in his community as a thoroughgoing and
up-to-date agriculturalist. The home and other farm buildings are kept in
the best of repair and the general appearance of the place reflects great credit
on Mr. Brinkerhoff.
In politics Mr. Brinkerhoff is a Democrat and takes a commendable
interest in public affairs, but he has never consented to run for public office
of any character. While not a member of any church, he is a firm believer
in their efficiency as a moral agency and their influence for good in any com-
munity, and he gives a liberal support to the various churches in this con\-
munity.
On the 25th of July, 1898, Mr. Brinkerhoff wedded Nettie Wagner,
the daughter of Michael and Mary (Hawk) Wagner, the former a native
of Alsace, Germany, and the latter of Wayne county, Ohio. They have
become the parents of the following children: Charles Ira. born November
19. 1899; Harry Clement, bom November 29, 1900; Erma June, bom Jun^
(\ 1903, died October 15th of the same year; Fay. born September 6, 1904;
George, born September 2c, 1906; Fern, born May 14. 1908. Socially Mr.
Brinkerhoff is an appreciative member of Rising Star Lodge No. 22, Knights
of Pythias. He is a man of splendid personal qualifications and has lent his
influence to the support of every movement calculated to benefit the commu-
nity, morally, educationally or materially. A man of genial disposition and
kindly manner, he enjoys the friendship of all who know him.
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§94
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
WILLIAM BELL.
The names of those men who have distinguished themselves through the
possession of those qualities which dady contribute to the success of private
life and to the public stability, and who have enjoyed the confidence and
respect of those about them, should not be permitted to perish. Such a one
is William Bell, whose name needs no introduction to the readers of this
book, and whose reputation is internat;onal, having long been one of America's
importers of blooded horses. He is one of Wayne county’s leading citizens
and takes an abiding interest in whatever pertains to the general upbuilding
of the community.
Mr. Bell was born in Bole, Nottinghamshire, England, December 17,
1861, the son of Samuel Bell, Sr., and Martha (Ell:s) Bell. The father, a
man of sterling worth and excellent business traits, was born at Gainsboro,
England. He was a stock man and well known in that line of business.
William Bell was educated in the village schools of Bole, finishing his
education at Wesleyan school, Gainsboro. Soon after finishing school he
came to Amerca, when nineteen years of age, bringing some horses with
him, for he had early in his youth decided to follow the footsteps of his
father in the stock business. He established himself at Montreal, Canada,
and began importing horses, but believing that a better field for his opera-
tions existed at Wooster, Ohio, he soon afterwards came here. He had some
valuable experience before coming west, shipping horses from New York,
where he first landed, to Boston and other points, gradually becoming a more
expert judge of horses and learning how to manage the business profitably,
having by this time gained a very extensive knowledge of the commercial
side of stock raising and selling. He formed a partnership with his brother,
Samuel, the firm being known as the Bell Brothers, in 1880. They were suc-
cessful from the first in this venture and the business grew from year to year,
until today it has a national prestige. They have imported one hundred stal-
lions a vear for the past five years. The first few years was not especially
"‘easy sailing" and the business has gradually grown until it has reached im-
mense proportions. They are importers of shires, — Tercherons, Belgian, and
German coach horses. — all full blooded, and they are greatly admired by all
who see them. They also handle large numbers of American bred horses.
That Mr. Bell is an excellent judge of livestock is shown by the fol-
lowing letter, which he received from the International Live Stock Exposi-
tion at ( hicago. where he was a judge in 1909. which is self-explanatory:
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
895
“Union Stock Yards,
“Chicago, 111., December 22, 1909.
“Mr. William Bell,
“Wooster, Oh;o.
“Dear Sir: The able and efficient service rendered our Exposition by
your worthy self, as judge of the Percheron horses, is deserving of more than
passing comment, for you not only justified the action of the board who se-
lected you to act in this important capacity, but you also acquitted yourself
with such credit that your splendid service was a subject of much commenda-
tion, and I am pleased to be able to report that not a single complaint of any
description was brought to my attention in connection with your work. This
must be exceedingly gratifying to you when you consider that your decisions
were watched also by the entire livestock world, so to speak; for, as the In-
ternational is regarded as the ‘Court of Last Appeal,’ you, therefore, descrip-
tively speaking, held the position of a judge of the supreme court.
“I desire to thank you most heartily for your painstaking efforts, and sin-
cerely trust that you will not hesitate to command me should I, at any future
time, be able to prove myself of service to you.
“Wishing you the compliments of the season and hoping that the New
Year will bring you much happiness and increased prosperity, I am,
“Yours very truly,
“B. H. Heide,
“General Superintendent.”
In all his extensive and varied interests Mr. Bell has shown himself to
be a master of details, possessing rare executive ability and business acumen
of a high order. With duties that would greatly worry the average man,
he has his labors so systematized that he experiences little or no trouble in
do:ng them. He is a vigorous as well as an independent thinker, a wide
reader, and he has the courage of his convictions upon all subjects which he
investigates. He is also strikingly original and fearless, having a keen dis-
cernment, prosecuting his researches after his own peculiar fashion, caring
Fttle for conventionalism or for the sanctity attaching to person or place by
reason of artificial distinction, tradition or the accident of birth. He is essen-
tially cosmopolitan in his ideas, a man of the people in all that the term im-
plies, and in the l est sense of the word a representative of that virile man-
hood which commands and retains respect by reason of inherent merit, sound
sense and correct conduct.
Mr. Bell was married in Wooster March 28. 1888, to Ella Camp. Her
parents were Ferdinand and Elizabeth (Brosius) Camp, who lived in North-
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896
WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
umberland county, Pennsylvania. The mother died in 1876 and the father
in 1893. Mr. and Mrs. Bell had two children, a son, William Ellis, born
October 29, 1894, died at the age of four years and seven months; a daugh-
ter, Esta Elizabeth, born June 7, 1901, and who is attending school. She
is a bright little girl and the joy of her parents.
Fraternally Mr. Bell is a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fel-
lows. His religious membership is with the Lutheran church, to which his
wife also belongs. Politically he is a Republican. Mr. and Mrs. Bell are
whole-souled and very pleasant people to meet in their home at No. in South
Market street, where every one is made welcome.
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